VISION

1)  Puducherry celebrates its De Jure Transfer day

•Puducherry on 16th August celebrated its De Jure Transfer day. Speaker of the Puducherry Assembly, R. Selvam, paid floral tributes at the memorial in Kizhur, a remote hamlet in Puducherry, where the transfer of power took place on the same day in 1962. De Jure Transfer Day is the day it really got independence. The then Pondicherry was under French control well after 1947.

•The treaty of cession signed between the French and Indian governments was ratified by the French Parliament only on August 16, 1962. So on that day the “De-Jure”(The Legal Merger of the UT with the Indian Union) was effected. 178 representatives participated in the referendum in which 170 voted in favour of a merger with India and 8 against it.

2)  Mahatma Gandhi to be given the US Congressional Gold Medal

•An influential US lawmaker from New York reintroduced a resolution in the US House of Representatives to posthumously award the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal to Mahatma Gandhi in recognition of his promotion of peace and nonviolence.

•The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian award in the United States. Gandhi would be the first Indian to receive a Congressional Gold Medal, an honour bestowed upon such great figures as George Washington, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Rosa Parks.

3)  Ghaziabad is world’s second most polluted city of 2020

•Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad was adjudged the second most polluted city out of the 50 ‘most polluted cities’ in the world in 2020 by a report prepared by British company HouseFresh. Ghaziabad reported an average Air Quality Index (AQI) of 2.5 particulate matter (PM) in 106.6µg/m3.

•Preceding Ghaziabad, the Chinese city of Hotan in Xinjiang province has been named the most polluted city with a PM2.5 of 110.2µg/m3. The report attributed the air pollution in Hotan to sandstorms resulting from its closeness to the Taklimakan Desert, which is the largest shifting sand desert in the world.

•Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan contribute to 49 out of the 50 most polluted cities worldwide. According to the report, Bangladesh was the most polluted country across the world in 2020, followed by Pakistan, India and Mongolia. Meanwhile, Judbury in Australia bagged the top position in the list of cities with the cleanest air with a PM2.5 level of 2.4µg/m3. Kailua Kona in America’s Hawaii and Muonio in Finland with PM2.5 concentrations of 2.6µg/m3 and 2.8µg/m3 respectively were the next top cities of 2020 with clean air.

4)  Mohammad Azam honoured with National Youth Award

•Mohammad Azam from Karimnagar district in Telangana has been awarded the National Youth Award recently by the Union Youth Affairs and Sports Minister Anurag Singh Thakur in Delhi for displaying exemplary leadership qualities. He has conducted several awareness programmes related to blood donation, organ donation and plantation programmes under the Haritha Haram project. The award carries an appreciation certificate and Rs 50,000 cash.

•Apart from these, he has also worked on water conservation, construction of soaking pits, works related to the Swachh Bharat mission and government welfare schemes, for the benefit of the people in various villages. He received the ‘Indira Gandhi NSS Award’ from then President of India Pranab Mukherjee. He was also awarded the Pratibha Puraskar award by the State government in the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh and the Rashtriya Gaurav Samman Award.

5)  UP govt to set up Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) training centre

•The Uttar Pradesh government has decided to set up a training centre for Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) commandos in Saharanpur’s Deoband. According to sources, the government has already allotted over 2,000 square meters of land for establishing the ATS training centre in Deoband. Deoband is on the Uttaranchal and Haryana border and it is an important place to help us increase our depth, presence and operation efficiency in western parts of the state.

6)  Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin resigns

•The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Muhyiddin Yassin and his cabinet resigned after losing a confidence vote in parliament. The 74-year-old Muhyiddin came to power in March 2020. He will however stay on as a caretaker prime minister until a successor is named.

•The resignations plunged Malaysia even deeper into political turmoil while it contends with one of the world’s worst surges of the virus. The nation of about 32 million people has averaged more than 20,000 cases per day in the last 14 days, and just 33 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated. The total death toll from the pandemic in the country is at least 12,510.

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Kurukshetra Magazine August 2021 English PDF

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1)  Narendra Singh Tomar inaugurates world’s second-largest refurbished gene bank

•The Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Narendra Singh Tomar has inaugurated the world’s second-largest National Gene Bank at the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR), Pusa, New Delhi.

•The refurbished state-of-the-art National Gene Bank provides the facility for germplasm, to secure the heritage of seeds for years in minus 20 degrees Celsius temperature.

•The new facility will help in the conservation of the diversity of indigenous crops in the country, as well as benefit the farmers by making them self-reliant and providing a source of increasing their income. A National Gene Bank is a facility to preserve the seeds of Plant Genetic Resources (PGR) for future generations.

2)  Venkaiah Naidu laid foundation stone of Innovation and Development Centre

•The Vice President of India, M Venkaiah Naidu laid the foundation stone of the Innovation and Development Centre of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru.

•The JNCASR Innovation and Development Centre will be developed into a facility where laboratory inventions will be taken forward for scale-up and technology transfer, and in turn help in meeting the missions of “Make in India” and “Aatmanirbhar Bharat”.

•Scientists will be provided with state-of-the-art processing and prototyping tools to enable the translation of inventions. JNCASR is established by the Department of Science and Technology at Jakkur, Bangalore.

3)  Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel announces 4 new districts

•Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel has announced the creation of four new districts and 18 new tehsils in the state.

•The four new districts are: Mohla Manpur, Sarangarh-Bilaigarh, Shakti, Manendragarh.

•With the creation of four new districts, the total number of administrative districts in the state have reached 32.

4)  President Ram Nath Kovind confers 144 Gallantry awards in 2021

•President Shri Ram Nath Kovind, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, has approved 144 Gallantry awards for armed forces, police and paramilitary personnel on the occasion of Independence Day 2021.

•Besides, President Kovide also approved 28 Mention-in-Despatches to the army personnel for their significant contributions in different military operations.

5)  Government announces ‘Prime Minister Gatishakti Scheme’

•Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced a Rs 100 lakh crore Pradhan Mantri Gatishakti scheme while addressing the nation on the 75th Independence Day from Red Fort.

•The Pradhan Mantri Gatishakti scheme aims to adopt a holistic and integrated approach in infrastructure growth and create employment opportunities for the youth of the country.

•The government will soon announce the Master Plan for the scheme, to help boost the productivity of industries, and boost the economic growth of the country, besides creating job opportunities for hundreds of thousands of youths.

6)  A book to explore life and works of Jayaprakash Narayan

•A new biography of revolutionary leader and independence activist Jayaprakash Narayan will hit the stands on August 23, publisher Penguin Random House India.

•The book, “The Dream of Revolution: A Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan”, shares anecdotes and never-before-told stories from the life of the man who was known for his “emotional hunger for transformative politics, shunning power and incubating revolutionary ideas”.

•According to the publisher, the book, written by historian Bimal Prasad and author Sujata Prasad, explores “the ambiguities and ironies of a life lived at the barricades, and one man’s unremitting quest to usher in a society based on equality and freedom”.