
GS2: Polity
- Questionnaire of NPR being finalised: RGI (TH) According to the Citizenship Rules framed in 2003, the NPR is the first step towards compilation of the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) or NRC.
- Explained: What is the Mahajan Commission report on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border dispute? (IE) The erstwhile Bombay Presidency, a multilingual province, included the present-day Karnataka districts of Vijayapura, Belagavi, Dharwad and Uttara-Kannada.
GS2: Health
- Dr. Harsh Vardhan addresses Global Prevention Coalition (GPC) for HIV Prevention (PIB) Speaking on India’s unique HIV prevention model which is centeredaround the concept of ‘Social Contracting’ through which the Targeted Interventions (TI) programme is implemented, the Union Health Minister remarked, “With support from Non-Government Organizations, the programme is aimed at providing outreach, service delivery, counselling & testing and ensuring linkages to HIV care. India’s prevention model can be adopted and scaled up in many countries by tailoring the intervention as per local settings. It can also be replicated in other prevention and disease control programmes.”
GS3: Economy
- Finance panel for PPPs on health infra (TH) The Fifteenth Finance Commission has mooted a greater role for public-private partnerships to ramp up the health infrastructure and scale up public spending on health from 0.95% of GDP to 2.5% by 2024, its chairperson N.K. Singh said on Wednesday.
GS3: Environment
- Explained: What are deemed forests, and why Karnataka wants to declassify some (IE) The issue of deemed forests is a contentious one in Karnataka, with legislators across party lines often alleging that large amounts of agriculture and non-forest land are “unscientifically” classified as such.
GS3: Science & Technology
- "Explained: India has dismissed as ‘fake’ a report about China’s use of ‘microwave weapons’.What are they? (IE)" The Indian Army has rejected as “baseless and fake” a report in the British daily newspaper ‘The Times’, which had quoted a Chinese professor to claim that the Chinese army had used “microwave weapons” to drive Indian soldiers away from their positions in eastern Ladakh.
- Explained: The Guillain Barre Syndrome some Covid-19 patients develop (IE) It is a very rare autoimmune disorder. The immune system, in an attempt to kill the coronavirus, accidentally starts attacking the peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nervous system is a network of nerves that lead from the brain and spinal cord to different parts of the body. Attacking them can affect limb functions.
- Chapare virus Explained: What is this rare Ebola-like virus that can spread from human to human? (IE) A rare Ebola-like illness that is believed to have first originated in rural Bolivia in 2004 can spread through human-to-human transmission, researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have discovered.
- "India’s AI supercomputer Param Siddhi 63rd among top 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world (PIB)" The AI system will strengthen application development of packages in areas such as advanced materials, computational chemistry & astrophysics, and several packages being developed under the mission on platform for drug design and preventive health care system, flood forecasting package for flood prone metro cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Patna and Guwahati. This will accelerate R&D in war against COVID-19 through faster simulations, medical imaging, genome sequencing and forecasting and is a boon for Indian masses and for start-Ups and MSMEs in particular.