“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”
Anatole France
“महान वस्तुओं को प्राप्त करने के लिये, हमें सिर्फ कर्म ही नहीं करना चाहिये, बल्कि स्वप्न भी देखना चाहिये; सिर्फ योजना ही नहीं बनानी चाहिये, बल्कि विश्वास भी रखना चाहिये।”
एनाटोल फ्रांस
The University of Dundee in collaboration with the British Council is offering the ‘Great scholarships’ 2021-22 for Indian students to study a full-time, on-campus, postgraduate course of value £10,000. The offer starts in September 2021. Interested and eligible candidates can apply for the scholarship by May 7.
The scholarship is given for the tuition fees. It offers international students who want to study at the UK university a one-year postgraduate course. It also encourages the students to apply and demonstrate an interest in the chosen subject, through examples of work or academic experience.
Eligibility criteria:
— Candidate is a passport holder from India;
— Candidate should have an offer to study a full time, on-campus, postgraduate taught programme at the University of Dundee, starting in September 2021;
— Candidate should have an international fee status, as verified by the University of Dundee
The ‘Great scholarship’ programme is offered across several postgraduate courses such as Anatomy / Forensic Anthropology / Forensic and Medical Art, Architecture and Urban Planning, Art and Design, Biological/Biomedical Sciences, Biomedical Engineering / Medical Imaging, Business (Accountancy / Economics / Finance / International Business), Civil Engineering / Structural Engineering, Computing / Applied Computing / Data Science / Data Engineering, Education, Electronic Engineering, Energy Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy, English, Geography / Environmental Science, History, Law, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering / Industrial Engineering, Nursing and Health Sciences, Philosophy, Physics, Politics, and International Relations, Psychology, Social Work.
The University of Dundee currently has 14 ‘Great scholarships’ available for the 2021-22 academic year for students from China (two), Egypt (one), Ghana (one), India (one), Indonesia (two), Kenya (one), Malaysia (two), Pakistan (two) and Thailand (two) for all subjects.
Source: Indian Express, 30/03/21
In the present context, which seeks to demonstrate, measure and quantify learning, learning outcomes (LO) have become a fetish with policymakers and textbook developers, an idea popularised by large-scale assessment surveys, such as the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), in India. LO essentially refers to grade-appropriate, basic competencies in numeracy and literacy, which schoolgoing children are supposed to acquire.
The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the apex body responsible for making curriculum, syllabus and textbooks, has already come out with two documents listing learning outcomes at elementary and secondary stages, while the one for the higher secondary stage is underway. This is because the new National Education Policy 2020 underscores the importance of foundational skills as being central to a child’s schooling. State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) will be soon expected to toe the line. However, the government of Andhra Pradesh has already initiated the exercise. Besides deciding to convert all government schools from Classes I to X to English medium, the state education department was directed to prepare “mirror image” textbooks — with lessons printed in English and Telugu, side by side. This seems to be more of a mechanical exercise without any sound pedagogic rationale. A quick review of the new textbooks shows that they centre around LO and follow a didactic approach of essentially presenting information/facts that children are supposed to passively consume and memorise. Such books typically deny the agency of both the teacher and the student, making them subservient to the printed text. They are physically heavy but conceptually terse.
It was with great difficulty that National Curriculum Framework, prepared by NCERT in 2005, changed the form and nature of textbooks. Any change of government at the Centre or state level was/is usually followed by a change in textbooks, particularly history. Besides blatant misuse as a political tool, textbooks suffer from other limitations. They reproduce social inequalities by either omission of diverse social groups or their misrepresentation. The landmark Learning Without Burden (LWB) committee (1993) identified dense, poorly written and weakly conceptualised textbooks as being primarily responsible, in addition to unwieldy syllabi and rote-based exam system, for burdening children’s school lives. The NCF 2005, with its roots in LWB, redirected the meaning of quality education to curricular, pedagogic and assessment practices being followed inside the classrooms. It sought to connect the life of the child outside school with learning in the classroom.
Soon after, NCERT developed “exemplar/model” textbooks which were conceptually sound and used a variety of pedagogic techniques to bring in real-life issues in the book. The social science textbooks particularly acknowledged social conflicts which children experienced in their lives and helped make sense of them. They also gave fresh life to the meaning of learning which was no longer a one-way track of passing on information to children but became a process of constructing knowledge meaningfully by both the teacher and the student.
A few states took the lead and initiated the formation of state curricular frameworks, position papers and the development of textbooks. Undivided Andhra Pradesh was one of them. However, with the revision of the earlier written books, which were both pedagogically sound and collaboratively developed, it seems like the state is bent on undoing its own achievements.
There is no denying that textbooks, just like curricular frameworks, syllabus, and assessment practices, need to be revised periodically. However, textbooks tailored to measure the acquisition of LO on part of children is a self-defeating exercise. This singular focus on LO will take the teaching-learning processes away from the possibility of a meaningful co-construction of knowledge to a teacher teaching to the test. Since teachers’ own appraisal is contingent on children’s performance in these tests, they feel pressured to ensure that children know the basic minimum and somehow pass the test.
The choice is ours — whether we will allow testing to take precedence over learning or celebrate learning as a meaning-making exercise by both the teacher and the student.
Written by Disha Nawani
This article first appeared in the print edition on March 31, 2021 under the title ‘Testing over learning’. The writer is professor and dean, School of Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Source: Indian Express, 31/03/21
The controversy over the river-linking project is not new; it’s a part of a larger development versus ecology debate that India faces with every big project. But in an era of climate crisis, which has a multi-sectoral impact, addressing ecological concerns is crucial and ensure long-term safety and benefits.
This week, the Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh governments signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) to start work on the country’s first major project interlinking two rain-fed rivers, Ken and Betwa. The agreement was signed 18 years after the project was first conceived as a part of country’s programme to interlink rivers to provide water to areas facing scarcity. The project is expected to ensure drinking water to 6.2 million people and irrigate one million hectares of land in 13 districts across both states, the majority of which fall in the water-starved Bundelkhand region, which has seen back-to-back droughts in the last decade.
Experts have flagged two concerns. First, project proponents fail to take into account the fact that the water crisis is not just a natural one; it’s partly man-made. The region’s granite topography does not allow rainwater to seep in and recharge the groundwater table, but this problem has been aggravated by policies that support faulty cropping patterns, encourage groundwater exploitation, degrade the soil and hack away at forest cover. Second, the project may submerge 6,107 hectares of the old and biodiverse forests of the Panna Tiger Reserve and Ken Ghariyal Sanctuary. This can impact water availability, rainfall patterns and destroy local ecosystems. Instead, the government could have pushed for low-cost, local interventions such as renovating and building water harvesting systems, desilting reservoirs and lakes and working towards a change in cropping patterns.
The controversy over the river-linking project is not new; it’s a part of a larger development versus ecology debate that India faces with every big project. But in an era of climate crisis, which has a multi-sectoral impact, addressing ecological concerns is crucial and ensure long-term safety and benefits.
Source: Hindustan Times, 25/03/21
A study conducted on water supply projects in Gujarat in 2000 showed that when women were included in technical and decision-making capacities, there was a marked improvement in the impact of projects.
Water scarcity has been consistently considered as one of the top five risks by business leaders in the annual global risk report of the World Economic Forum. According to the United Nations, over two billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress. India alone has 88 million people who lack access to safe water, placing the nation at the centre of this global problem. Eighty per cent of India’s freshwater is used in agriculture, making it a critical resource for the livelihoods of farmers and the country’s food security. Farmers rely heavily on groundwater through wells and tube-wells. The crisis created by large-scale groundwater extraction needs concerted and scaled-up water management efforts in rural India.The water problem runs deep, and to address it, it is crucial to identify and mobilise the right agents for change. Women constitute 37% of the agricultural workforce — with nearly 100 million involved in the sector. Several studies, as well as our institutional experience, have revealed that women spend twice the number of hours that men do, working on fields in the cropping season. With men increasingly migrating out of their villages, women are now working in farms alongside managing their homes — both of which need them to plan for and use water judiciously. Considering their high stakes in ensuring water security, women are well poised to champion change.
Women engage with the issue of water in different avatars — as farmers, panchayat members, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) workers and extension workers. This makes them well-suited to leading water management programmes. For instance, apart from their presence in agriculture, women have a significant representation in governance. At least 43% of elected representatives in local bodies such as panchayats, are women. Women’s participation in MGNREGS is high and stands at almost 55%.
They have also demonstrated their ability to mobilise funds from the government. In a project in West Bengal, women influenced the government to release MGNREGS funds to construct water supply structures that created an additional water potential of 7.4 billion litres and benefitted 35,000 women, Unicef’s work in India has also proved women’s prowess at mechanical work. In Jharkhand’s Lava panchayat, women formed a diverse group from across every panchayat to maintain 450 pumps. They even ran their village spare stores and met the domestic water needs of 130 villages. In this endeavour, they were more efficient and were able to resolve issues more quickly than their male counterparts.
A study conducted on water supply projects in Gujarat in 2000 showed that when women were included in technical and decision-making capacities, there was a marked improvement in the impact of projects. Women have also shown an eagerness to adopt new technologies, explore sustainable farming methods and spread awareness among their families, making them excellent potential water champions. A 2017 study, which explored the role of women farmers in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, reported that women-led collectives have driven changes in cropping practices, and demonstrated a bigger willingness to switch to organic inputs and grow climate-resilient crops that consume less water.
Women have been creating consistent ripples in India’s water security efforts — the time is right to leverage them as leaders of change. This heavily-invested, yet relatively unrecognised, demographic of women farmers are likely to power the next frontier of positive change. The idea that diverse leadership teams create better and more innovative outcomes is not new. Several organisations have deployed winning diversity programmes to deliver breakthrough business results, endear themselves to an increasingly conscious set of consumers and attract the best talent. With an already strong presence of driven and aware women in agriculture, the same principles can well be the key to accelerating India’s journey towards water security.
Sanjiv Mehta is chairman and managing director of Hindustan Unilever Limited
Source: Hindustan Times, 21/03/21
“There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self- interests. This is a bitter truth.”
Chanakya
“हर मित्रता के पीछे कुछ स्वार्थ होता है। बिना स्वार्थ के कोई मित्रता नहीं होती। यह एक दुःखद सत्य है।”
चाणक्य
Vimal Chudasama, the Congress MLA from Somnath constituency, was evicted from Gujarat Assembly by Speaker Rajendra Trivedi for coming to the House wearing a T-shirt. Chudasama, who was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a black t-shirt, with the words, ‘free spirit’ on it, responded that he had won votes campaigning in this attire. His party too opposed the Speaker’s decision arguing that there were no rules regarding how a legislator should dress in the Assembly. Nonetheless, the Speaker refused to budge, stating, “Because you are an MLA, you cannot come to the House in any manner, in any clothes. This is not a playground. You are not on a vacation. There is a protocol of uniform.”
It is true that there are no rules with regard to the attire of a political leader in Parliament or any Assembly. However, it is also a fact that clothing has always been a matter of political statement. Who can forget the furore when Mahatma Gandhi walked into Buckingham Palace to meet King George V in a dhoti and shawl? It was a strategic act by Gandhi to identify with the poorest of Indians. But directives regarding who wears what has come up on several occasions in the Indian past, including those imposed by Gandhi himself. What politicians must wear was also briefly discussed in the Constituent Assembly.
In medieval India’s Mughal domains, the ruling elite had insisted on the adoption of Mughal styles of clothing by all officials in the government. Social anthropologist Emma Tarlo in her book, ‘Clothing matters: Dress and identity in India’ notes: “This had forced many elite Indians into Mughal dress in the public sphere. As a strategy of resistance, most Hindus used to remove their foreign apparel before entering their own homes, thereby distinguishing their imposed identity from their chosen identity.”
This was not the case with the British though, who preferred to look and dress differently from the local populace. “In their dress and demeanor they constantly symbolised their separateness from their Indian superiors, equals and inferiors,” writes anthropologist Bernard Cohn in his article, ‘Cloths, clothes and colonialism: India in the nineteenth century’. In 1830, a legislation was introduced banning all members of the East India Company from wearing Indian clothes in public functions. English writer Aldous Huxley had observed the British dependence on clothing rituals in the following words: “It is as though the integrity of the British Empire depended in some directly magical way upon the donning of black jackets and hard boiled shirts” — as cited in Tarlo’s book.
Often these rules of sartorial choices were deemed rather uncomfortable by most British who found the climate in India unsuitable for garments like kid or suede gloves.
The British obsession with their clothes was driven more by the fact that a certain section of the Indian population, particularly the educated elite, had taken a liking towards European dress and manners. This was further linked to the problem that the British did not want Indians to adopt European fashion but wanted them to buy and wear British manufactured textiles. For the British, the dress of the Indians posed an ethical dilemma. “On the one hand they felt their duty to civilise barbaric natives and rescue them from their own primitiveness,” writes Tarlo. “But on the other hand the British did not want the natives to become too civilised.”
Tarlo narrates an incident from the life of the Bengali poet, writer and dramatist, Michael Madhusudan Dutta that best illustrates the British policy towards Indian dressing. Dutta was sent to Bishop’s College in Calcutta where he was given a Western education and developed European tastes as desired by the British. Yet he was discouraged from wearing the same uniform as his college mates did. Dutta devised a plan to trick the British. He appeared in an elaborate Indian outfit of white silk with a colourful turban and shawl. Embarrassed by the choice of clothing, the college authorities allowed Dutta to wear the regular uniform.
With the birth of the 20th century and the waves of nationalism brought by it, a new form of order was brought upon how Indians ought to dress. The Indian nationalist critique of the British government’s policies leading to the impoverishment of India formed the basis of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal starting in 1903. As the movement progressed, there was an increasing amount of discussion and propaganda to encourage Indian weavers and to revive the hand spinning of cotton thread. These ideas were essentially developed and formalised by Gandhi.
“Gandhi continually articulated and elaborated on the theme that Indian people would only be free from European domination, both politically and economically, when the masses took to spinning, weaving and wearing homespun cloth, khadi,” writes Cohn. He notes that during the non-cooperation movement of the 1920s, the wearing of khadi, and particularly the cap which went on to be referred to as the ‘Gandhi cap’ became an act of political resistance.
The movement did have the desired impact on the British. In March 1921, Gandhi reported that several European employers had banned the donning of white khadi caps in office. A month later, in Allahabad, the collector forbade government employees from wearing them. Similar action was also taken in Simla. Khadi, Gandhi argued, had the potential to bring the Raj to its knees.
It was not easy though to convince people to adopt khadi. Most, and especially the elite, had come to equate foreign cloth to bring civilised. Gandhi therefore insisted on the moral obligation to take to Khadi. In an act of building psychological pressure, he emphasised on the transformative quality of the cloth. “The mere act of wearing khadi was so virtuous in itself that it could purify the wearer, whereas foreign cloth was so intrinsically vile that contact with it was physically and mentally defiling,” explains Tarlo. His speeches on the virtues of khadi were so stirring that there were numerous episodes of people stripping themselves off their foreign garments and burning them.
So sure was Gandhi of Khadi’s ability to transform India that when after Independence people were tempted to give up on the cloth, he wrote that Khadi represented a choice of life based on non-violence and that people mistook it to be a mere strategy to attain Independence.
What to wear in an Independent India
The moral obligation and national consciousness attached to Khadi did not die down after Independence. After fighting for freedom under the Khadi banner, politicians found it difficult to turn away from it. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru chalked out for himself a non-western look stitched out of khadi: tight pyjamas teamed up with long sherwani and what is now famous as the ‘nehru jacket’. “Concerned by the post-independence sartorial confusion around him, Nehru wrote an official note on dress, advising those in higher grades of government office to steer clear of European clothes, which ‘marked them out as a privileged, denationalised and out-of-date class, and to adopt such clothes as would take them closer to the people’,” writes Tarlo.
Nehru’s commitment to a non-European look was passed on to his daughter Indira Gandhi who also would be seen in public mostly in handloom cotton sarees. Rajiv Gandhi too favoured khadi after he entered office in 1984.
The debate over what to wear did come up in the constituent assembly debates as well. On April 29, 1947, Rohini Kumar suggested a ban on discrimination against dress worn by any nationality. “Even today when we are on the threshold of independence there are hotels which do not welcome people dressed in Indian style,” he said. “I am not afraid of the future, because I believe that when India is independent such restrictions would disappear. But what I am afraid of is a reprisal or a revenge taken against such European minded people and people in European dress may not be allowed to come into hotels. For that reason particularly I want that this amendment should be accepted by this House.”
On November 17, 1949 B Das suggested that a national dress must be specified: “I hate to see officials still moving about in ties and collars. Our association with the Commonwealth does not entitle anybody to put on foreign dress. They should be debarred from doing it. Parliament should debar by legislation. Nobody in the employment of the State should wear foreign dress.”
It was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel whose response came to be agreed upon by most parliamentarians of an Independent India. “Such things as dress cannot be put in the fundamental rights,” he said responding to Chaudhury. “If the world at large should read such provisions in our fundamental rights, then they would naturally conclude that we do not even know how to treat our nationals and how to treat our fellow beings.”
Written by Adrija Roychowdhury
Source: Indian Express, 19/03/21
Further reading:
Clothing matters: Dress and identity in India by Emma Tarlo
Cloths, clothes and colonialism: India in the nineteenth century by Bernard Cohn
COVID-19 infections are once again on the rise with daily infections crossing 60,000 per day last week. This is considerably higher compared to the reported infections during the same period last year when the numbers were less than 500 per day. What is obvious is that the pandemic is far from over despite the availability of vaccines. However, unlike last year, the response this time has been muted with no nationwide lockdown. One of the reasons for the differing responses is the lesson from the unintended consequences on the economy of the strict lockdown last year. While aggregate estimates on the growth rate of GDP showed a sharp contraction in economic activity (the economy shrunk by 24 per cent in the April-June quarter of 2020) the impact on lives and livelihoods is still unfolding even though the sharp contractionary phase seems behind us.
The extent of the loss of lives and livelihoods is becoming clear only now, with detailed data from the Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS) — the latest round of which is for the April-June quarter of 2020. This is the first official report on the estimates for the quarter, which witnessed the worst impact with the lockdown in force until the middle of May. Visuals of thousands of migrants walking back to their villages are still fresh in the mind. While many have returned to urban areas in the absence of jobs in rural areas, many did not. The PLFS, which captures the employment-unemployment situation in urban areas, provides some clues to what happened.
The estimates from PLFS are broadly in line with estimates available from other privately conducted surveys, notably the unemployment surveys of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). According to the PLFS April-June 2020 round, the urban unemployment rate for the population above the age of 15 was 20.8 per cent, which is close to the monthly average for the same quarter from CMIE at 19.9 per cent. The CMIE data, however, does suggest a sharp decline in June compared to April and May. Similar to the CMIE data, the PLFS data also shows a sharp rise in the unemployment rate which more than doubled compared to the unemployment rate in the preceding quarter of January-March 2020 at 9.1 per cent and 8.8 per cent in the same quarter (April-June) of 2019. While one in five persons above the age of 15 was unemployed during April-June 2020, the unemployment rate among the 15-29-year-olds was 34.7 per cent — every third person in the 15-29 age group was unemployed during the same period.
These are staggering numbers, but not surprising. While the lockdown certainly contributed to the worsening of the employment situation, particularly in urban areas, the fact that the economy was already going through severe distress as far as jobs are concerned is no longer surprising. Between 2016-17 and 2019-20, growth decelerated to 4 per cent, less than half the 8.3 per cent rate in 2016-17. The fact that the economy has not been creating jobs predates the economic shocks of demonetisation and the hasty roll-out of GST. The PLFS data from earlier rounds have already shown the extent of the rise in unemployment compared to the employment-unemployment surveys of 2011-12. The unemployment rates in urban areas for all categories increased by almost three times between 2011-12 and 2017-18. On an internationally comparable basis, the unemployment rate among the 15-24-year-olds in 2017-18 was 28.5 per cent, which makes the youth unemployment rate in India amongst the highest in the world, excluding small countries and conflict-ridden countries. Since then, it has only worsened or remained at that level.
The worsening situation is partly a result of the long-term neglect of the employment issue in policy circles. It is also a result of policy decisions such as demonetisation and GST implementation, which affected the informal/unorganised sector adversely. It is these enterprises in the unorganised sector that are the drivers of employment creation. Since 2016-17, most of these sectors have suffered as a result of policy choices. The decline in the number of workers by 15 million between 2011-12 and 2017-18 is only a partial reflection of the jobs crisis. The decline in jobs was accompanied by a decline in the quality of employment, with an increase in precarious jobs and a decline in access to social security for a majority of workers. The deceleration in the growth rate of economic activities also meant that real wages of casual workers in rural areas by January 2021 have declined compared to two years ago. Regular salaried workers were already suffering from a decline in real wages at 1.7 per cent per annum between 2011-12 and 2017-18. More recent data after the pandemic is not available but sectoral surveys do suggest that the decline in real earnings of regular salaried workers has continued. The lockdown only aggravated an already fragile employment situation.
Since the PLFS is also a longitudinal panel data, it is possible to examine what happened to different categories of households during the April-June 2020 quarter compared to the pre-lockdown January-March 2020 quarter. While the lockdown affected all workers, the most vulnerable were casual wage workers. Among casual wage workers employed during the January-March quarter, 50 per cent joined the ranks of unemployed and another 10 per cent exited the labour force. Only one out of three casual workers in urban areas could hold on to their job with another 5 per cent moving into the self-employed category. The regular salaried workers fared better but even among them 10 per cent lost jobs and another 5 per cent moved out of the labour force. Among those who were fortunate to retain their jobs, most suffered declines in earnings.
More recent data from the PLFS is awaited, but estimates from the CMIE data suggest that the unemployment rate has fallen 7 per cent for the 15 and above age population in recent months. While this may suggest that the economy is returning to the pre-pandemic levels, the rate is still very high. This level of unemployment is not just a symptom of the “jobless” model of economic growth that has been followed in the last two decades, but is also a recipe for political and social instability. The pandemic and the subsequent crisis in the employment-unemployment situation has only highlighted the fragile situation of the labour market. The real crisis of unemployment and jobless growth is a bigger pandemic that is unlikely to be resolved with the current model of economic growth which prioritises capital over labour.
Written by HIMANSHU
his article first appeared in the print edition on March 29, 2021 under the title ‘A bigger pandemic’. The writer teaches economics at JNU
“No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.”
Oscar Wilde
“कोई भी वस्तु इतनी सुंदर नहीं होती कि कुछ परिस्थितियों में वह असुंदर न दिखे।”
ऑस्कर वाइल्ड
The Japanese scientific research institute called RIKEN and Fujitsu started developing the “Fugaku” six years ago. It is the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Now this supercomputer is fully ready and developed in Japan and is now available for the research use.
This supercomputer has been developed with the aim of making the device core of the computing infrastructure of Japan. Then the supercomputer was tested for the particular projects in order to combat COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020. Now the Fugaku is fully open and available for shared use. The Research Organization for the Information Science and Technology (RIST) of Japan has selected some 74 projects which will use this supercomputer in the financial year 2021. RIST has also proposed for the development of the new projects in several categories and has invited the researchers who are interested to apply for the same.
It is a key national technology that has been developed with the goal to achieve research results which ultimately will help in building a long-lived and healthy society, better energy use and disaster mitigation. It also aims to establish the government’s vision of making “ultra-smart Society 5.0”. The supercomputer has topped the top500 list, which is a “Supercomputer benchmark index”, for the second year in line. The computer comprises of 100 times the application performance of K supercomputer. It has been developed to implement the high-resolution, large-scale and long-duration simulation. Fugaku has been named after an alternative name for Mount Fuji. It started development in the year 2014 as the successor to the K computer. It is built with the Fujitsu A64FX microprocessor.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the kindle version of Swami Chidbhavanandaji’s Bhagavad Gita on March 11, 2021. The Prime Minister lauded the efforts to bring out e-book version as this would connect more youngsters with the noble thoughts of the Gita.
Spiritual organisation Brahma Kumaris’ chief administrator Dadi Hriday Mohini died on March 11, 2021 in Mumbai. She was 93. After the death of its former chief Dadi Janki a year ago, Dadi Mohini was appointed as the chief administrator of the organisation.
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have decided to join hands to take up activities on rice crop area and air quality monitoring using satellite data.
Chemicals and Fertilizers Ministry has accorded approval for Promotion of Domestic Manufacturing of critical Key Starting Materials, Drug Intermediates and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients under Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme. The Scheme will benefit domestic manufacturers, help in creating employment and is expected to contribute to the availability of a wider range of affordable medicines for consumers.
Railway Minister Piyush Goyal on March 10, 2021 flagged off a 3000 HP Cape Gauge locomotive indigenously developed by the Banaras Locomotive Works to be exported to Mozambique. Indian Railways is exporting the first batch of two locomotives as part of a total order of six 3000 HP Cape Gauge locomotives and 90 stainless steel passenger coaches to Mozambique.
Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) on March 11, 2021 launched a vendor onboarding mobile app for its upcoming e-commerce portal ‘Bharat e Market’. The app will enable businesses and service providers to register on the portal and create their own “e-dukaan”. It is ‘purely Indian’ Bharat e Market portal and will comply with all the rules & regulations of the country.
Ministry of Civil Aviation and Directorate General of Civil Aviation have granted a conditional exemption to ICAR – Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research (IISR), Lucknow for conducting the trials to evaluate drone spraying solution for controlling pest and diseases of sugarcane crop using drones. The exemption is valid until November 30, 2021.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke over phone on March 11, 2021 during which the PM expressed his desire to further expand bilateral trade and investment, and highlighted the opportunities that the Indian economy offers to Saudi investors.