Current Affairs Quiz - November, 2023

Notes:
The Jharkhand Cabinet, last week, approved the ‘Abua Awas Yojna’ (AAY), a housing scheme for the poor, which will provide eight lakhs pucca houses to the homeless in the state, and has a total budget of Rs 16,320 crore.
The scheme will be implemented in three phases, with a target of 2 lakh houses in the current financial year; 3.5 lakh houses in FY 2024-25 and 2.5 lakh houses in FY 2025-26.

Notes:
The Group of Seven (G7) industrial nations officially adopted a code of conduct for companies involved in the development of advanced artificial intelligence systems.
Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) economies as well as the European Union, kicked off the process in May at a ministerial forum dubbed the ‘Hiroshima AI process’. The code aims to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI worldwide and will provide voluntary guidance for actions by organizations developing the most advanced AI systems.

Notes:
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and Tel Aviv University, Israel, have developed an aerogel adsorbent that can remove trace pollutants from wastewater.
The aerogel is made of graphene-modified silica and can remove small particles and microorganisms from wastewater.

Notes:
National Institute of Hydrology (NIH) is a premier Research and Development organization under the Ministry of Jal Shakti. It is located in Roorkee, Uttarakhand.
A new township in Ayodhya will have a lake filled with water from the holy Saryu River. The lake will be 430 acres and will be connected to the river. The National Institute of Hydrology in Roorkee will build the lake. The lake project has been named the blue and green corridor of the new Ayodhya township.

Notes:
The United States is planning to build a new nuclear bomb that will be 24 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.
The B61-13 would also be almost 14 times bigger than the 25-kiloton bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

Notes:
NASA conducted a sounding rocket mission known as the Integral Field Ultraviolet Spectroscope Experiment (INFUSE).
This mission was launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico with the aim of studying a stellar event within the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant that occurred approximately 20,000 years ago.

Notes:
Government e Marketplace (GeM) is a 100 percent Government owned & National Public Procurement Portal. Procurement of services from the Government e-Market (GeM) portal is expected to touch Rs 1.5 lakh crore this fiscal year. This is an increase from Rs 65,957 crore in 2022-23.
The CEO of GeM, P K Singh, said that service procurement was just Rs 3,069 crore in the fiscal year 2019-20. It reached Rs 65,957 crore in 2022-23. GeM has over 63,000 government buyer organizations and over 62 lakh sellers and service providers offering a wide range of products and services.

Notes:
India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) collections in October 2023 increased by 13.4% to Rs 1,72,003 crore, the second-highest ever. The growth was driven by a rebound in imports.
The GST revenue collection for October 2023 is second highest ever, next only to April 2023. The gross GST for September, collected in October, rose 13% annually to Rs 1,72,003 crore. The growth in India’s gross Goods and Services Tax (GST) revenues bounced back in October with tax collections rising at a 10-month high pace of 13.4%.

Notes:
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s daughter, Saima Wazed, was nominated as the next Regional Director for the World Health Organization’s South-East Asia region.
Saima Wazed defeats Shambu Acharya, a public health veteran from Nepal, in a vote held during the 76th session of the WHO Regional Committee for South-East Asia Region.

Notes:
A new species of gecko has been discovered in the Western Ghats near Rajapalayam in Viridhunagar district of Tamil Nadu.
Senior scientist Amit Sayyed of Wildlife Protection and Research Society, Maharashtra, who led a team of researchers from different parts of the country, has named the previously undocumented species as Cnemaspis rashidi after his father, Prof. Rashid Sayyed.