PIB Summary- 28th March, 2022 | PIB (Press Information Bureau) Summary - UPSC PDF Download

Nodal Agency to test and Certify Defense Equipment

• As part of the annual Budget for 2022-23 an announcement has been made to set up an independent nodal umbrella body for meeting wide ranging testing and certification requirements.
• The nodal body is envisaged to be an autonomous body to permit, promote, hand-hold, monitor & supervise and act as a Single-Window Nodal agency to enable and regulate the existing facilities of Trial, Testing and Certification of Defense Products, besides creating new facilities.

Task Force for implementation of AI

Under the Chairmanship of Sh. N Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Sons.
Following were the major recommendations of the Task Force:

• Integrating and embedding AI strategy for Defence with Defence strategy.
• Establishment of a High level Defence AI Council(DAIC) and a Defence AI Project Agency (DAIPA).
• Development of Data Management Framework, Establishing Data Management Office and appointing Data Management Officer.  
• Scaling the existing capability of Data Centers and establishing a centrally facilitated network of Test Beds.
• Creation of a framework to work with Industry and encouraging start-ups to develop AI capability for Defence and IP management.
• Organising AI training courses in all Defence training centers and institutes for training of Defence Personnel.
• Earmarking of AI budget from yearly Defence Budget with a corpus of Rs 1,000 crores to be provided each year for next 5 years to support AI activities

Based on the recommendations of the aforesaid Task Force, Ministry of Defence through created Defence AI Council (DAIC) under the Chairmanship of Raksha Mantri and Defence AI Project Agency (DAIPA) with Secretary (DP) as ex officio head for providing necessary guidance to enable and effect development of operating framework, policy level changes and structural support for AI adoption.
Services have established organizational Institutional mechanism in the form of AI Sub Committee and Joint Working Group on AI in Tri-Services.
Further, an AI roadmap has also been finalized for each DPSU under which 61 defense specific AI projects have been identified for development.

Petascale Supercomputer Param Shakti inaugurated at IIT Kharagpur under National Supercomputing Mission

• PARAM Shakti”, a Petascale Supercomputer “at IIT Kharagpur, has been dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)  and Department of Science and Technology (DST).
• 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.
• This facility has pioneered in using RDHX based efficient cooling system to obtain a high power usage effectiveness. This system has been tested extensively by both IIT Kharagpur and CDAC for commercial, open-source and in-house software pertaining to diversified applications.
• IIT Kharagpur is also one of the NSM nodal centres for training in HPC and AI and working on development manpower required for the Supercomputing Research across the nation.
• 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.
• NSM has sponsored a number of application research projects using this Supercomputing facility involving researchers for IIT Kharagpur and other Indian institutes and industries.
• Supercomputing facility will provide a major boost to the research and development initiatives in Indian academia and industries to reach a position of global esteem.

Unavailability of Clean Water

• Government of India in partnership with States is implementing Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) – Har Ghar Jal to make provision of potable tap water supply to every rural household of the country by 2024.
• As informed by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, AMRUT was launched on 25 June, 2015 in selected 500 cities across all States /Union Territories (UTs) with focus on providing infrastructure in the sectors of water supply, sewerage and septage management, storm water drainage, non-motorized urban transport, and green spaces and parks.
• So far, out of target of providing 139 lakh tap connections to achieve universal water supply coverage in the selected cities, 126 lakh household water tap connections have been provided under AMRUT and in convergence with other schemes. State-wise details of household tap connections provided under AMRUT.
• Further, Government of India has launched AMRUT 2.0 on 01 October, 2021 for the period of 05 years (FY 2021-22 to 2025-26), with the objective of providing universal coverage of water supply through functional household tap connections in all statutory towns in the country. 
• AMRUT 2.0 focuses on making cities water secure through recycle/reuse of treated sewage, rejuvenation of water bodies and water conservation. AMRUT 2.0 focuses on making the cities ‘self-reliant’ and ‘water secure’.