Inflation impact on India’s poor negligible, says FM citing UNDP report

• While soaring food and energy prices could push up to 71 million people around the world into poverty, the UNDP said in the report that the chances of those in India earning $1.9 a day slipping into poverty due to this upturn would be zero, while the impact would be a mere 0.02% and 0.04% if a poverty line of $3.30 or $5.50 a day was assumed, respectively.
• A recent comparative assessment of price and income support measures shows that targeted transfers helps poorer households cope with price spikes.

Government Initiatives

• India’s ‘well-tailored’ programmes carried out over the past two years to support people and ensure they don’t run the risk of slipping into poverty seemed to have made an impact.
• The Centre has allocated more than 1,000 lakh tonnes of foodgrains from April 2020 till September this year, over and above the food security quota and had provided support of ₹1,500 to 20 crore women Jan Dhan account holders in the first three months of the pandemic.

India to surpass China as most populous country in 2023

• The world’s population, estimated to reach 8 billion by November 15 this year, could grow to 8.5 billion in 2030, and 10.4 billion in 2100, as the pace of mortality slows, said the report released on World Population Day.
• India’s population was 1.21 billion in 2011, according to the domestic census, which is conducted once a decade. The government had deferred the 2021 census due to the pandemic.
• The world’s population was growing at its slowest pace since 1950, having fallen below 1% in 2020, UN estimates showed.
• In 2021, the average fertility of the world’s population stood at 2.3 births per woman over a lifetime, having fallen from about 5 births in 1950.
• The UN said more than half of the projected increase in the global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in eight countries — Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.

PM Modi unveils 6.5m high National Emblem cast on new Parliament building

• The National emblem of India is an adaptation of the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath, an ancient sculpture dating back to 280 BCE during the reign of the Maurya Empire.
• The statue is a three dimensional emblem showing four lions.
• Following the end of British rule on 15 August 1947, the newly independent Dominion of India adopted an official state emblem on 30 December 1947. It later became the emblem of the Republic of India.
• On 26 January 1950, a representation of the Lion Capital of Ashoka placed above the motto, Satyameva Jayate, was adopted as the State Emblem of India.

Soon AI-based Mandarin translation devices for troops on LAC

• This will be possible with the help of a 600gm Artificial Intelligence (AI) based device developed by an Indian start-up and currently under advanced trials with feedback from the Army.
• This was one of the 75 AI-enabled products and applications unveiled by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh at the ‘AI in defence’ symposium.
• It is an offline hand-held language translation system which works based on AI. It has been tested in the forward areas and Army has given lot of assistance. Its performance will improve as more and more data comes from the field.
• It is bidirectional with a range of 5-10 feet and gives converts Mandarin to English.

As of today, the most sensitive dark matter detector experiment in the world is LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) in South Dakota in the U.S.

• Many physicists strongly believe that the entire visible part of the universe forms only 5% of all matter in it. They believe the rest is made up of dark matter and dark energy.
• Dark matter is made up of particles that do not have a charge. So, these particles are “dark”, namely because they do not emit light, which is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and “matter” because they possess mass like normal matter and interact through gravity.
• There is strong indirect evidence for dark matter, and this evidence is reflected at various levels (or distance scales, as physicists would explain)

NASA Unveils James Webb Space Telescope’s First Full-Colour Images

• The pictures, designed to peer farther than before with greater clarity to the dawn of the universe, were hailed by NASA as milestone marking a new era of astronomical exploration.
• Nearly two decades in the making, the $9 billion infrared telescope was launched on December 25, 2021. It reached its destination in solar orbit nearly 1 million miles from Earth a month later.
• The crowning debut image was a “deep field” photo of a distant galaxy cluster, SMACS 0723, revealing the most detailed glimpse of the early universe recorded to date.
• Among the other Webb subjects were two enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars — the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light years away from Earth.
• The collection also included fresh images of another galaxy cluster known as Stephan’s Quintet, first discovered in 1877.

Serum Institute to launch indigenously made vaccine for cervical cancer

• The Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) granted market authorisation to Serum Institute of India (SII) to manufacture the indigenously developed India’s first Quadrivalent Human Papillomavirus vaccine (qHPV) against cervical cancer.
• The approval by the drug regulator of SII’s anti-cancer vaccine follows recommendation by the Subject Expert Committee (SEC) of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization on COVID-19 vaccine on June 15, 2021.
• Cervical cancer in India ranks as the second-most frequent cancer among women between 15 and 44 years of age.

Centre has no new data on child labour

• Since the NCLP was merged with the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan in 2016, the labour Ministry has no records of child labour. The currently available data is of the 2011 Census, which says the country has more than a million child labourers.
• Education Ministry also does not have a mechanism to find out the number of children engaged in child labour.
• Though India has a legislation, the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, since 1986 the menace of child labour is continue unchecked.