Current Affairs Quiz - January, 2023

Notes:
As part of India’s G 20 presidency, a Business20 (B20) inception meeting was organised at Gandhinagar in Gujarat.
The first B20 meet being organized was attended by over 500 delegates who discussed upon various global issues including climate change, sustainability, digital transformation, and financial inclusion during several plenary sessions.

Notes:
Estonia is a country in Northern Europe, bordering the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland. Russia and Estonia have expelled the ambassadors from each other’s countries in a tit-for-tat move.
Estonia’s diplomatic representation will be downgraded to a charge d’affaires that heads the European Union country’s mission in Moscow.

Notes:
The Swedish government has announced an international information campaign, to discourage refugees from coming to the country.
The campaign includes distributing an information package to foreign authorities and other authorities with contact points abroad. 76 per cent of the refugees who arrived in the Nordic countries in 2019 ended up in Sweden.

Notes:
As per United Nations (UN) World Economic Situation and Prospects 2023 report, India’s growth is likely to remain strong at 5.8 per cent.
The growth estimation was slightly lower than the estimated 6.4 per cent in 2022, due to higher interest rates and effect of global slowdown on investment and exports. UN also predicted a worsening outlook in most developing regions amid the fear of a possible recession.

Notes:
The Ministry of Defence in collaboration with Ministry of Education, Department of School Education & Literacy, organised the Veer Gatha Project 2.0.
Under the project, school students may be motivated to do projects/activities based on gallantry award winners. Veer Gatha Edition-1 was attended by 8 lakh students last year, while this time the number of these entries has crossed 19 lakhs.

Notes:
The G20 Startup20 Engagement Group will hold its first inception meeting in Hyderabad. Delegates from G20 nations and nine special invitees from observer countries, and representatives from multilateral organizations will attend the meeting.
The Startup20 inception meeting is expected to lay a foundation for the official Policy Communique, a Startup Handbook with a set of commonly agreed-upon definitions and terminologies, and a Global Innovation Centre to foster collaborations across borders.

Notes:
The world’s first made-in-India intranasal Covid-19 vaccine iNCOVACC, manufactured by Bharat Biotech, was launched on the occasion of 74th Republic Day.
Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya launched the vaccine. iNCOVACC was approved by the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) in November for limited emergency use as a heterologous booster dose in adults. The vaccine is now available on CoWIN.

Notes:
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is aiming to launch the Aditya-L1 mission by June or July 2023.
Aditya-L1 is the first Indian space mission to observe the Sun and the solar corona. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru recently handed over one of the most challenging scientific payloads to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Notes:
MeitY Startup Hub (MSH), an initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and Meta have announced the list of 120 startups and innovators for the XR Startup Program.
XR Startup Program is a collaboration between MeitY Startup Hub and Meta to discover, nurture, and accelerate Extended Reality (XR) technology startups and innovators across India. The Accelerator Program supports 40 early-stage start-ups working in XR technologies with a grant of Rs. 20 lakhs each.

Notes:
National Institute of Biologicals was set up in 1992, as an apex autonomous institute under the administrative control of Ministry of Health & Family Welfare.
Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya, virtually inaugurated the National Summit on Quality of Biologicals.