Yearly Archives: 2023

MEDICAL ASSISTANCE WORTH ₹7 CRORE TURKEY AND SYRIA

On February 6, when the disaster struck, three truckloads of relief material consisting of life-saving emergency medicines and protective items were arranged at the Hindon airbase within 12 hours. The consignment consisted of 5,945 tonnes of emergency relief material which included 27 life-saving medicines, two kinds of protective items and …

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DEMAND FOR SPECIAL CONSTITUTIONAL STATUS -LADAKH

The normally peaceful residents of Ladakh are in agitation mode. They are set to gather in Delhi today to pursue their demand for special constitutional status, which would allow them to decide on a development path that safeguards the region’s fragile ecological and cultural heritage. On January 26, one of …

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FRIENDLY DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM IN INDIA

The estimation in Census 2011, that 2.21% of India’s population is disabled is a gross underestimation. According to the World Health Organization, about 16% of the global population is disabled. If that figure is extrapolated to the Indian context, it would mean at least 192 million disabled people. While technology …

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THE ADANI STORY AND INDIAN NEOLIBERALISM

A strike on the Adani group by short-seller the U.S.-based Hindenburg Research has led to the unravelling of the Gautam Adani story, which celebrated the spectacular rise, in an extremely short period of time, of the wealth of a man and his business empire. Much of that wealth disappeared following …

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CONSUMER PRICE INDEX AND UNTAMED INFLATION

Just five days after Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das asserted that inflation ‘has shown signs of moderation and the worst is behind us’, Monday’s release of Consumer Price Index (CPI) estimates for January revealed a disconcerting reversal in price gains trend. Headline retail inflation, which had steadily eased …

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ChatGPT & CYBERSECURITY

ChatGPT is fun and provides us with various contents but its also making the cyber criminal’s life easier. While OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, has built barriers to stop malicious content creation on the platform, criminals are working their way around these to create phishing emails and malware code. Generative AI …

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MILLET – SUPER FOOD

Till the onset of the green revolution, millets used to be staple food for many communities in India. They were 25% of the staple food supply in the early 1970s. However, the green revolution technology and policy environment gave rice and wheat a strong advantage over millets. This led to …

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LIGHT POLLUTION

At night, light from homes and streets reflects off Earth’s surface, leading to a constant ‘haze’ that makes celestial bodies hard to see. This is most noticeable in urban environments where even bright celestial bodies are barely visible to the naked eye. Artificial Light management The Indian Institute of Astrophysics …

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DARK SKY OBSERVATORY – HANLE

Hanle Dark Sky Reserve Is Expected To Boost Tourism And Wildlife Conservation At High Altitude India’s first ‘dark sky reserve’ or night sky sanctuary,lies at an elevation of 4,500m above sea level in a cluster of six hamlets that form Han le village inside the Changthang Cold Desert Wildlife Sanctuary …

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J&K – NEW SOURCE OF LITHIUM:

A lot rides on lithium in the age of electric mobility and personal devices. But the lightest metal known to humans is also famously scarce. Hence, the discovery of lithium deposits in J&K could come as a potential game changer for India. Chethan Kumar breaks it down. Lithium Referred to …

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POWER HERITAGE BILL

A draft Bill, aimed at protecting India’s geological heritage that includes fossils, sedimentary rocks, natural structures, has raised alarm in India’s geo-sciences and palaeontology community. The Draft Geo-heritage Sites and Geo-relics (Preservation and Maintenance) Bill, 2022, while deemed necessary by several researchers, vests powers entirely in the Geological Survey of …

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U.K. FOR TIE-UP IN HIGH-END DEFENCE TECHNOLOGIES

Terming the need for strong relations between India and the U.K. “mission critical”, U.K. Minister for Defence Procurement Alex Chalk pitched for collaboration in high-end defence technologies, including jet engine technology. He also pitched for cooperation in supply chain resilience, which had been brought to the fore in the war …

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URBAN PLANNING

On December 24, 2009, a tunnel boring machine in Joshimath, Uttarakhand, hit an aquifer about three kilometres from Selang village. This resulted in the loss of nearly 800 litres of water per second (enough to sustain the needs of nearly 30 lakh people per day). Soon after, groundwater sources began …

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TACKLING POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION

The links between childbirth and mental disorders have been described for hundreds of years. Mental illness after childbirth isn’t merely of historical interest. As illustrated by the findings of the U.K. Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths, suicide is a leading cause of maternal death following childbirth. In India itself, the …

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INDO-PACIFIC ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK (IPEF)

India hosted the special negotiating round for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) in New Delhi, India, from February 8-11, 2023.  The round covered IPEF Pillars II (Supply Chains), III (Clean Economy), and IV (Fair Economy). Approximately 300 officials from India, the United States, Australia, Brunei, Fiji, Indonesia, Japan, …

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TURKEY EARTHQUAKES

Two large earthquakes, one of magnitude 7.8 and closely followed by a magnitude 7.5, hit south-eastern Turkey, claiming at least 17,000 lives and counting, wreaking considerable damage in Turkey as well as Syria. Nearly 200 aftershocks have followed with earthquakes of magnitude 6 being reported in the region three days …

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MILLETS FOR A HEALTHIER FUTURE

Anna Gibbs, who was an intern at Science News, writes in the May 9, 2022 issue that “no matter how you slice it, climate change will alter what we eat in the future”. Half of all calories consumed by humans come from maize, rice and wheat. We depend on 13 …

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