23 March 2020: PIB Summary & Analysis

March 23rd, 2020 PIB:- Download PDF Here

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. World Tuberculosis Day
2. COVID Emergency Fund
3. Shaheedi Diwas (Martyrs’ Day)
4. Dr Ram Manohar Lohia
5. Modernisation of Defence Industry
6. Ordnance Factory Board (OFB)
7. National Supercomputing Mission

1. World Tuberculosis Day

Context:

President of India sends out a message on the eve of the World Tuberculosis Day.

About the World Tuberculosis Day (World TB Day):

• World TB Day, falling on March 24^th each year, is designed to build public awareness that tuberculosis today remains an epidemic in much of the world, causing the deaths of nearly one-and-a-half million people each year, mostly in developing countries.
• It commemorates the day in 1882 when Dr Robert Koch astounded the scientific community by announcing that he had discovered the cause of tuberculosis, the TB bacillus.
• At the time of Koch’s announcement in Berlin, TB was raging through Europe and the Americas, causing the death of one out of every seven people. Koch’s discovery opened the way towards diagnosing and curing TB.
• The day is observed to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of TB, and to step up efforts to end the global TB epidemic.
• Each day, over 4000 people lose their lives to TB globally and close to 30,000 people fall ill with this preventable and curable disease. Global efforts to combat TB have saved an estimated 58 million lives since the year 2000.
• The theme of the 2020 TB Day is ‘It’s time’.

To know more about Tuberculosis (TB), click on the linked article.

2. COVID Emergency Fund

Context:

Prime Minister Modi expressed gratitude to the heads of several SAARC countries for their contribution to the Fund.

Details:

• India had extended $10 million to this Fund.
• Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan contributed $5 million, $1.5 million and $1 million respectively to the COVID Emergency Fund.
• For more on this, please refer CNA dated 16^th March, 2020.

3. Shaheedi Diwas (Martyrs’ Day)

Context:

Prime Minister Modi paid tributes to Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru on the occasion of the Shaheedi Diwas (Martyrs’ Day) on 23^rd March.

Details:

• 23^rd March is the day when revolutionary freedom fighters Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged to death by the British government in 1931 at the Lahore Jail.
• They were hanged for their involvement in the assassination of the ASP of Lahore, John Saunders.
• For more on this, please check This Day in History dated March 23.

4. Dr Ram Manohar Lohia

Context:

Prime Minister paid tributes to Dr Ram Manohar Lohia on his birth anniversary.

Details:

To know more about the life and contributions of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, click on the linked article.

5. Modernisation of Defence Industry

The following steps have been taken by the government which would help in bringing in critical technologies and modernize the Defence Industry in the country:

1. Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) has been revised in 2016 wherein specific provisions have been introduced such as ‘Buy Indian Designed Developed and Manufactured (IDDM)’ for stimulating growth of the domestic defence industry.
2. Government has notified the ‘Strategic Partnership (SP)’ Model which envisages establishment of long-term strategic partnerships with Indian entities through a transparent and competitive process, wherein they would tie up with global Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to seek technology transfers to set up domestic manufacturing infrastructure and supply chains.
3. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Policy has been revised and under the revised policy, FDI is allowed under automatic route up to 49% and beyond 49% through Government route wherever it is likely to result in access to modern technology or for other reasons.
4. Mission Raksha Gyanshakti: Mission Raksha Gyanshakti was launched in 2018-19 with the objective of creating greater Intellectual Property in Defence Production Ecosystem.
5. Artificial Intelligence in Defence: Creation of Defence Artificial Intelligence Project Agency (DAIPA) was done in March,2019 for greater thrust on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Defence, formulation of an AI roadmap for each Defence PSU and OFB to develop AI-enabled products and insertion of 3 percent points in MoU with Defence PSUs for AI products being developed.
6. Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX): The objective of iDEX is bringing startups to innovate, develop technology and solve problems related to defence and aerospace. Read more on iDEX on PIB dated 10 Nov, 2019.

6. Ordnance Factory Board (OFB)

Context:

Modernisation of OFB.

Details:

• For details on the Ordnance Factory Boards, check CNA dated 22 Aug, 2019.

7. National Supercomputing Mission

Context:

National Supercomputing Mission: a transformative approach in supercomputing.

About the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM):

• The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
• These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing Grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN).
  • The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network.
• The mission was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups by creating the capability design, manufacturing, of supercomputers indigenously in India.
• The mission is steered jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
• The target of the mission was set to establish a network of supercomputers ranging from a few Tera Flops (TF) to Hundreds of Tera Flops (TF) and three systems with greater than or equal to 3 Peta Flops (PF) in academic and research institutions of national importance across the country by 2022.
• This network of Supercomputers envisaging a total of 15-20 PF was approved in 2015 and was later revised to a total of 45 PF (45000 TFs), a jump of 6 times more computing power within the same cost and capable of solving large and complex computational problems.
• With the revised plan in place, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, called Param Shivay, was installed in IIT (BHU).
• Similar systems Param Shakti and Param Brahma were installed at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune. They are equipped with applications from domains like Weather and Climate, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Bioinformatics, and Material science.
• There are plans to have more supercomputers in various institutes of higher learning in the country.
• Objectives of NSM:
  • To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance.
  • To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains.
  • To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing.
  • To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.

Application areas of NSM:

March 23rd, 2020 PIB:- Download PDF Here

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