Current Affairs Quiz - June 2022

Notes:
Etalin hydroelectric project is proposed to be set up in the state of Arunachal Pradesh. The 3,097-MW project requires diversion of over 1100 hectares of forest land and felling of over 280,000 trees.
Wildlife scientists and conservationists in the state have written to Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), about the threats to local biodiversity from the project

Notes:
Former State Bank of India Deputy Managing Director Natarajan Sundar has been appointed as the Managing Director and CEO of NARCL (National Assets Reconstruction Company Ltd) as MD & CEO.
NARCL is the joint initiative of Public and Private Sector Banks, and is expected to takeover bad loans from banks and focus on resolution and recoveries. NARCL has shareholding from 15 Indian Banks and Canara Bank is the sponsor bank.

Notes:
The 118th meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) comprising Indus Commissioners of India and Pakistan was recently organised.
During the meeting, the annual report for the year ending on March 31, 2022, was finalised and signed. The next meeting of the PIC would be held in Pakistan. According to the of the Indus Waters Treaty, around 33-million-acre feet water of eastern rivers- Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi is allocated to India for unrestricted use annually, and about 135 MAF of western rivers-Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab to Pakistan.

Notes:
‘Frontier’ became the world’s fastest supercomputer, according to the Top500 list of world’s most powerful supercomputers with Linmark benchmark score of 1.1 exaflops.
It is a supercomputer built using Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) architecture and equipped with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processors. It surpassed Fugaku, Japan’s supercomputer jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu Ltd., which topped the supercomputer benchmarking index in 2020.

Notes:
The Times Higher Education (THE) released the 2022 edition of the Asia University Rankings with universities from 31 countries and territories.
India is the third most-represented country, with 71 universities making it to the list. Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore is the only institute to make the top-50 list at 42^nd rank. JSS Academy of Higher Education and Research (65^th), IIT Ropar (68) and IIT Indore (87) were in top 100 list.

Notes:
IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has partnered with an e-marketplace for agricultural land, SFarms India, to develop a farm land price index based on the sales and purchases done on the platform.
The ‘IIM-Ahmedabad SFarmsIndia Land Price Index (ISALPI)’ records and presents the data on prices of agricultural land in the country. It can be used by local governments to compensate people who lose land for highway expansion

Notes:
India’s first liquid-mirror telescope, the International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) has been set up on the campus of the Devasthal Observatory of the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) in Nainital, Uttarakhand.
The telescope will observe asteroids, supernovae, space debris and all other celestial objects from an altitude of 2,450 metres in the Himalayas. It is the first liquid-telescope globally to be designed exclusively for astronomical purposes.

Notes:
The world’s largest plant- the ribbon weed (Posidonia australis) has recently been discovered off the West Coast of Australia.
It is a sea-grass which is measured to be 180 km in length. Ribbon weed rhizomes can usually grow to around 35cm per year and with this, the scientists arrived at its lifespan of 4,500  years. It has double the number of chromosomes than other similar plants, and managed to survive the volatile atmosphere of the Shark Bay.

Notes:
UIDAI has announced that it would provide IPPB postmen with the necessary digital devices such as a desktop or laptop-based Aadhar kit to update the necessary details of Aadhar card holders.
UIDAI also plans to onboard over 13,000 banking correspondents currently working with the Common Service Centre (CSC) of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Notes:
The forest department of Bihar has recently established an elephant rescue centre at Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve (VTR) to rehabilitate stray and injured elephants.
The reserve is located in Bihar’s West Champaran district, with Nepal to its north and Uttar Pradesh to its west. In the last few years, several elephants stray into the reserve from the neighbouring Chitwan National Park in Nepal.