22-11-22 Daily-Gujarat-GPSC Current Affairs

Indias first National Centre of Excellence for Green Port & Shipping (NCoEGPS) was announced by the Union Minister of , Shipping and Waterways.

National Centre of Excellence for Green Port & Shipping (NCoEGPS) is a major initiative of the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways to provide sustainable solutions for the shipping sector.

Its main purpose is to assist the union ministry in developing and maintaining a policy and regulatory framework for the promotion of green alternative technology in Indias shipping sector.

Its ultimate goal is to ensure the sectors shift towards carbon neutrality and circular economy (CE).

This centre is in line with the Indian Governments Mission LiFE movement.

PM KISAN Scheme is a Central Sector Scheme to supplement financial needs of land holding farmers. Financial benefit of Rs. 6000 per year is transferred into the bank accounts of farmer families through direct benefit transfer. Certain categories of higher economic status are excluded from the scheme.

This ambitious scheme, which was launched on 24^thFebruary, 2019 by Honble Prime Minister, is one of the largest DBT Schemes in the world. The scheme has been able to reach out to crores of farmers, with no middlemen involved in between. Maintaining absolute transparency in the process of registration and verification of beneficiaries, Government of India has been able to transfer benefits within minutes of press of a button by Honble Prime Minister during the bulk release events.

The release of benefits for any installment period under PM KISAN has now crossed 10 crore farmers from 3.16 crore for the first instalment period more than 3 times increase in over 3 years.

PM KISAN through a span of over 3 years has successfully provided assistance of more than Rs. 2 lakh crores to crores of needy farmers. Of this amount, more than Rs 1.6 crores has been transferred since the lockdown due to Covid Pandemic.

PM KISAN is an evolving scheme. The scheme was initiated with eligibility of the farmers determined on self-certification by each farmer. Improvements have been made overtime in the way farmers are registered and verified by the States.

The Department of Consumer Affairs launched the framework for safeguarding and protecting consumer interest from fake and deceptive reviews in E-Commerce.

The standard will initially be voluntary for compliance by all e-commerce platform. Bis will also develop a Conformity Assessment Scheme for the standard to assess compliance.

The guiding principles of the standard are Integrity, accuracy, privacy, security, transparency, accessibility and responsiveness. The standard prescribes specific responsibilities for the review author and the review administrator. For review author, these include confirming acceptance of terms and conditions, providing contact information and for review administrator, these include safeguarding personal information and training of staff.

The of Tamil Nadu recently issued a notification declaring Madurai districts Arittapatti and Meenakshipuram villages as the states first Biodiversity heritage site.

The Arittapatti Biodiversity Heritage Site spans across two villages Arittapatti village (Melur block) and Meenakshipuram village (Madurai East taluk).

Arittapatti village is known for its ecological and historical significance. It hosts some 250 bird species, including three important raptors (birds of prey) the Laggar Falcon, the Shaheen Falcon and Bonellis Eagle. It also hosts Indian Pangolin, Slender Loris and pythons and others.

The declaration of this site was made under Section 37 of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.

India assumed the Chair of the Global PARTNERSHIP on (GPAI), an international initiative to support responsible and human-centric development and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This comes close on the heels of India taking over the presidency of G20, a league of worlds largest economies at Bali, Indonesia.

The Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology and Skill development & Entrepreneurship, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar represented India virtually at the GPAI meeting held in Tokyo for the symbolic takeover from France, which is the outgoing Council Chair.

With National Programme on AI in place and a National Data Governance Framework Policy and one of worlds largest publicly accessible data sets programme in the works, the Minister reiterated Indias commitment to efficient use of AI for catalyzing innovation ecosystem around AI, that can create good, trusted applications for our citizens and the world at large.

The NDGFP aims to ensure equitable access to non-personal data and focus on improving the institutional framework for government data sharing, promoting principles around privacy and security by design, and encouraging the use of anonymization tool.

AI is expected to add USD $967 Bn to Indian economy by 2035 and USD 450500 billion to Indias GDP by 2025, accounting for 10% of the countrys USD 5 trillion GDP target.

Large tech firms are competing to develop and implement AI-based language models. Google is developing a model that can support the 1,000 most spoken languages of the world, the company revealed at its AI event this month. To investigate the potential of such a vast project, Google is also working on an AI language model which can support around 400 languages. The company claimed this model had the largest language coverage among existing speech models.