Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar highlights East Asia Summit role in free Indo-Pacific

• Beginning in 2005, 16 participating countries comprised this grouping, with their first meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• These members were the 10 ASEAN countries, Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea.
• ASEAN’s 10 member countries are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
• The United States and the Russian Federation joined at the 6th East Asia Summit in 2011.
• The EAS is an ASEAN initiative and refers to the annual Meeting of Heads of States/Governments of these countries, where they are able to discuss common concerns and interests.
• Its creation was based on the idea of enhancing cooperation among East Asian countries and those in the neighbouring regions.
• Six priority areas of cooperation were identified – environment and energy, education, finance, global health issues and pandemic diseases, natural disaster management, and ASEAN Connectivity.
• In the past, the issues of claims over the South China Sea, the United Nations Convention on the Law Of the Sea, terrorism, the actions of North Korea and the conflict situation in Myanmar have been discussed by the countries.

EAS’s links with India:

• This year marks the 30th anniversary of ASEAN-India relations and is being celebrated as the ASEAN-India Friendship Year.
• Vice President recently announced an additional contribution of USD 5 million to the ASEAN-India science and technology fund to enhance cooperation in sectors of public health, renewable energy and smart agriculture.

Finding Indian language equivalents for selfie, drones

• People across India can log onto the ‘Shabd Shala’ website and provide suggestions for possible translations of these words or their most prevalent usages in their respective languages.
• After collating all the suggestions, the Technical Words Selection Committee will zero in on the most popular or appropriate translations for each word, following which a glossary would be brought out in all the respective languages.
• The committee, to be constituted in consultation with the Education Ministry, will comprise of subject experts in science and technology, and experts in linguistics and the Sanskrit language.
• It was established on October 01, 1961 in pursuance of a Presidential Order dated April 27, 1960.
• Presently, CSTT is functioning under Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, Government of India with its headquarters at New Delhi.
• The main objective is to evolve standard terminology, propagate its use, and distribute it widely.
• The commission is mandated to collaborate with State governments, universities, regional textbook Boards, and State ‘Granth Academies’, which are nodal bodies in-charge of providing translations of English textbooks in local languages for institutions of higher education.
• Eighteen States were mandated to have Granth Academies.

Lift off! Artemis Moon rocket launch kicks off new era of human exploration

• It is only a lunar Orbiter mission even though, unlike most Orbiter missions, it has a return-to-Earth target — it is intended to lay the foundations for more complex and ambitious missions.
• The CubeSats it will carry are equipped with instruments meant for specific investigations and experiments, including searching for water in all forms and for hydrogen that can be utilised as a source of energy.
• Biology experiments will be carried out, and the impact of deep space atmosphere on humans will be investigated through the effect on dummy ‘passengers’ on board Orion.
• The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the most powerful ever built, will also be on test for its potential for more ambitious missions in the future.
• It’s been a half century since the six Apollo human Moon landings between 1969 and 1972.
• Since then, spacecraft have travelled beyond the solar system, exploratory missions have probed Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, more than 500 astronauts have made return trips to space, and permanent space labs have been set up.

Indian Cities Need To Invest $840 Billion In Infrastructure

• Its latest report, titled ‘Financing India’s Urban Infrastructure Needs: Constraints to Commercial Financing and Prospects for Policy Action’, puts forth the urgent requirement to leverage greater private and commercial investments to meet the emerging financial gaps.
• Financing on a repayable basis can be done either through debt, private lending or public-private partnership investments.
• These require a recurrent source of revenue to meet obligations, thus, mandating raising adequate resources.
• Much of the urban infrastructure in India is financed by tied intergovernmental fiscal transfers, that is, vertical and horizontal transfer of finance for attaining certain objectives sub-nationally.
• Of the finances needed to fund capital expenditures for Indian cities, 48% is derived from State governments, 24% from the Central government and 15% from urban local bodies’ own surplus.
• The rest includes public-private partnership (3%), commercial debt (2%) and loans from Housing and Urban Development Corporation, or HUDCO (8%).
• The report argues that the overall funding base to raise commercial revenues “appears to be low” owing to weak fiscal performance of cities and low absorptive capacity for execution of projects.
• The report states that city agencies have been unable to expand their resource and funding base to support private financing for services such as water supply, sewerage networks and bus services, as they are highly subsidised.

Nine Russian banks open Vostro accounts for rupee trade

• Russia becomes first country to facilitate rupee-based export-import transactions
• The move will facilitate India’s exports to sanction-hit Russia, which reported a 24% decline in the April-August period. The RBI-designed mechanism only entails trade in the Indian rupee, eliminating exchange risks.
• To facilitate trade through this route, the government, through an amendment in the foreign trade policy recently, allowed exporters to avail of incentives or duty rebates for settling trade in rupee terms.

Nostro account:

• A Nostro account is an account held by a bank in another bank.
• It allows the customers to deposit money in the bank''s account in another bank. It is often used if a bank has no branches in a foreign country.
• The main difference between a deposit account and a Nostro account is that the former is held by individual depositors while foreign institutions hold the latter.

Vostro account:

• A Vostro account is just another name for a Nostro account.
• It is an account held by a bank that allows the customers to deposit money on behalf of another bank.
• A Nostro account is a Vostro account for the bank that opens the account.
• If a person deposits money in the Vostro account, it will be transferred to the account holder''s bank.

As the global population reached eight billion, India''s population growth appears to be stabilising: UN

• The world population touched eight billion on November 15, 2022 and India was the largest contributor to the milestone, having added 177 million people of the last billion people born in the world.
• The UN population report said the global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950, having fallen under 1 per cent in 2020.
• The world’s population could grow to around 5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. It is projected to reach a peak of around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s and to remain at that level until 2100.
• India is projected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country in 2023, “with prospects to reap the demographic dividend as the median age of an Indian this year was 28.7 years, compared to 38.4 for China and 48.6 for Japan against a global value of 30.3 years,”.
• The population prospects report had said that India’s population stands at 1.412 billion in 2022, compared to China’s 1.426 billion.
• India is projected to have a population of 1.668 billion in 2050, way ahead of China’s 1.317 billion people by the middle of the century.
• According to UNFPA estimates, 68 per cent of India’s population is between 15-64 years old in 2022, while people aged 65 and above comprise seven per cent of the population.
• As per UN estimates, over 27 per cent of the country’s population is between the ages of 15-29. At 253 million, India is also home to the world’s largest adolescent population (10-19 years).
• UNFPA has noted that India has its largest ever adolescent and youth population. According to UNFPA projections, India will continue to have one of the youngest populations in the world till 2030 and is currently experiencing a demographic window of opportunity, a “youth bulge” that will last till 2025.
• China added 73 million people; the projection is that its contribution to the next billion in the global population will be in the negative.
• China, which is weighed down by a rapidly increasing ageing population, is projected to enter a “severe ageing” phase in 2035 with 400 million people above 60 years. This can be blamed mainly on its decades of one-child policy.
• China’s population grew by less than half a million-last year to 1.4126 billion as the birth rates fell for the fifth consecutive year.
• Since last year, China has allowed couples to have three children and even announced incentives for people to have more children.

In worst slide since 2020, October exports drop 16.7% to $29.78 bn

• Merchandise exports declined 16.7% on year in October, the first drop in 20 months and the worst slide since May 2020 when a nation-wide lockdown was imposed to contain the Covid outbreak.
• The curbs on exports of select steel products, iron ore and non-basmati rice and the ban on those of wheat to ease domestic inflation have also contributed to the export decline.
• Exports dropped below the crucial $30-billion mark for the first time since March 2021 to hit $29.8 billion. Imports, however, rose 5.7%, to $56.7 billion.
• Consequently, trade deficit inched up to $26.9 billion in October from $25.7 billion in the previous month; but it still remained lower than July’s record level of $30 billion.
• The export decline in October was rather broad-based, as 24 of the 30 key segments–including petroleum products, engineering goods, gems and jewellery, textiles and garments, chemicals and pharmaceuticals–witnessed contraction, due to an economic slowdown in key markets that started to weigh down demand.
• However, the sustained rise in imports, albeit at a slower pace, suggests domestic consumption still remains stronger than in many parts of the world.
• The World Trade Organisation (WTO) recently warned of a darkened 2023 and projected that global trade growth will drop to only 1% next year from 3.5% in 2022.

Google''s 1,000 language AI model

• Google is developing a model that can support the 1,000 most spoken languages of the world.
• The company claimed this model had the “largest language coverage” among existing speech models.
• Google’s plan is to build one gigantic model for the 1,000 languages so that both widely used and rarer languages can co-exist, interact, and grow together.
• Google doesn’t have a specific use case for the language model.
• However, the end goal is to enable Google users to experience better searches, more accurate auto-generated captions, natural online translation, and faster calculations.
• The project is under development and researchers are now collecting linguistic data to train the model.
• Through AI language models, companies aim to automate manual processes, generate new insights based on existing data, and reduce reliance on human labour in fields like translation, customer service, or computation. For instance, website chatbots etc.

Other language models:

• AI research firm, OpenAI built the GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) set of models named Davinci, Curie, Babbage, and Ada that can generate “natural” text responses and perform tasks like classification, simple summaries, address correction, answering questions, and more.
• Meta is also working on AI-based language translation.
• Facebook AI claims the M2M-100 model to be the first multilingual translation model that does not use English as the default language when it translates directly between 100 languages. It is also open source.
  • It is further focusing on AI-based translation for not just text, but primarily oral languages like Hokkien.

National Press Day 2022 Observed On 16 November

• It was on this day that the Press Council of India started functioning as a moral watchdog to ensure that the press maintains high standards and is not fettered by any influence or threats.
• Since the year 1997, the Council has commemorated the day in a significant way through seminars with relevant themes.
• The Press Council of India was first set up in the year 1966 by the Parliament on the recommendations of the First Press Commission.
• Status: It is a statutory body functioning under the Press Council Act, 1978.
• Objective: Preserving the freedom of the press and of maintaining and improving the standards of press in India.
• Function: It is a quasi-judicial authority. It adjudicates the complaints against and by the press for violation of ethics and for violation of the freedom of the press respectively.

Yudh Abhyas

• The 15-day-long exercise will focus on high altitude and extremely cold climate warfare.
• Exercise Yudh Abhyas is conducted annually between India and US with the aim of exchanging best practices, Tactics, Techniques and Procedures between the Armies of the two nations.
• The previous edition of the exercise was conducted at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, Alaska (USA) in October 2021.
• The schedule will include all operations related to peacekeeping and peace enforcement.
• The troops from both nations will work together to achieve common objectives.
• The joint exercise will also focus on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations.
• US Army soldiers of 2nd Brigade of the 11th Airborne Division and Indian Army soldiers from the Assam Regiment will be participating in the exercise.