National
Chief Minister of Goa
⇒ BJP leader Pramod Sawant took oath as the Chief Minister of Goa for a second consecutive term on 28 March 2022.
Goa Governor PS Sreedharan Pillai administered the oath to 48-year-old Mr Sawant in a ceremony at the Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee stadium in Taleigao near the state capital Panaji.
- Eight other MLAs also took oath as Cabinet Ministers during the ceremony.
» In the Goa state assembly election, the BJP won 20 seats in the 40-members House.
Matua Dharma Maha Mela 2022
⇒ On the occasion of 211th birth anniversary of Shree Shree Harichand Thakur ji, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi addressed the Matua Dharma Maha Mela 2022 at Shreedham Thakurnagar, Thakurbari, West Bengal on 29th March 2022 via video conferencing.
- Matua Dharma Maha Mela 2022 was organised by All India Matua Mahasangha from 29th March to 5th April 2022.
About Thakur ji:
- Shree Shree Harichand Thakur ji devoted his life for the cause of betterment of the oppressed, downtrodden and deprived persons in undivided Bengal during the pre-independence era.
- The social and religious movement started by him originated from Orakandi (now in Bangladesh) in 1860 and led to the formation of the Matua Dharma.
Book titled "Indian Agriculture towards 2030"
⇒ Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Shri Narendra Singh Tomar released a book titled “Indian Agriculture towards 2030: Pathways for Enhancing Farmers’ Income, Nutritional Security and Sustainable Food and Farm Systems”.
- The book was released at an event organized by NITI Aayog and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on 28 March 2022.
Publisher:
The book is published by Springer. The book includes a Foreword by the Hon’ble Vice President of India Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu. NITI Aayog Member Professor Ramesh Chand is one of the editors of the book.
About Book:
The book titled ‘Indian Agriculture Towards 2030’ mentions the deliberation process of a national dialogue by NITI Aayog, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare and Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying and the results of the facility provided by FAO since 2019.
Indian Agriculture towards 2030 covers the following themes:
- Transforming Indian Agriculture
- Structural Reforms and Governance
- Dietary Diversity, Nutrition and Food Safety
- Managing Climate Risks in Agriculture
- Science, Technology and Innovation
- Symbiosis of Water and Agricultural Transformation in India
- Pests, Pandemics, Preparedness and Biosecurity
- Transformative Agroecology-Based Alternatives for a Sustainable and Biodiverse Future
"PARAM Shakti”, a Petascale Supercomputer at IIT Kharagpur
⇒ “PARAM Shakti”, a Petascale Supercomputer at IIT Kharagpur, has been dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The supercomputer was inaugurated on March 27, 2022.
- National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) is a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).
- A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (CDAC) in March 2019 to establish this state-of the art Supercomputing Facility with 17680 CPU cores along with 44 GPUs.
Significance:
PARAM Shakti supercomputing facility is accelerating the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of computational and data sciences as it provides large-scale computing power to the user community of IIT Kharagpur and neighbouring academic and R&D institutes.
» IIT Kharagpur has also established the Centre for Computational and Data Science with a mandate to train the researchers in Supercomputer accelerated R&D.
- The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems of different fields of Science and Engineering.
- Some of the identified focus areas in which this supercomputing-based research will be of great value addition are: Computational Fluid Dynamics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Climate Change & Digital Earth, Computational Biology, Cryptography & Security, Smart Infrastructure & Sustainable Cities, Smart Materials etc.
Sports
Navy Open Laser and Bahia Sailing Championship – 2022
⇒ Indian Navy Watermanship Training Centre (INWTC), Karwar conducted the Navy Open Laser and Bahia Sailing Championship – 2022 from 22 to 26 March 2022 under the aegis of Indian Naval Sailing Association (INSA).
Yachtsmen and women from all three Commands of the Indian Navy viz. Western Naval Command, Eastern Naval Command and Southern Naval Command, seven INWTCs, Army Yachting Node (Mumbai) and Cadets from National Defence Academy honed and demonstrated sailing and watermanship skills in Karwar harbour.
Nearly 50 participants took part in the event, competing in three different classes of boats.
- The championship was conducted in three different classes of boats namely Laser (Standard), Laser (Radial) and Laser Bahia and 36 races were conducted in a span of four days with 12 races for each of the three categories.