10.03.22 Daily [Andhra Pradesh] APPSC Current Affairs

The Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission (APERC) has asked the power distribution companies (DISCOMs) to conduct a thorough study and come up with a good financing model for promoting the use of energy-efficient appliances by domestic consumers, with a focus on the widely adopted on-bill financing system.

During a review meeting here on Sunday, APERC Chairman Justice C.V. Nagarjuna Reddy said energy efficiency activities would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save on electricity bills. Every possible effort should be made to achieve these goals, he said.

Shalu Agarwal, senior programme lead at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), one of Asias leading not-for-profit policy research institutions, said that the APERC deserved all praise for encouraging the consumers to use energy-efficient appliances.

The CEEW is keen on partnering with the DISCOMs in Andhra Pradesh for implementing the demand-side management projects, she said.

Indian Scientists have designed an electrocatalyst system for energy-efficient hydrogen production with the help of electrolysis of urea. The urea electrolysis is helpful towards urea-based waste treatment with low-cost hydrogen production. This can be utilized for energy production towards our country’s benefits.

The energy requirement for production of hydrogen through water electrolysis can be reduced by 70 % through urea electrolysis. The energy-intensive counterpart of water splitting, oxygen evolution, can be replaced with urea oxidation in urea electrolysis. The low-cost, earth-abundant Ni-based catalysts are widely applied for this process. The main challenge associated with urea oxidation is retaining the prolonged activity of the catalyst as the strong adsorption of the reactive intermediate (COx) on the active site, referred to as catalyst poisoning, causes activity loss.

Union Labour and Employment Minister Bhupender Yadav launched the Donate-a-Pension programme under Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maan-Dhan (PM-SYM) for people to contribute to the pension fund of their support staff.

It is an initiative under (PM-SYM) pension scheme where citizens can donate the premium contribution of their immediate support staff such as domestic workers, drivers, helpers etc,

The Donate-a-Pension programme which was launched today is part of many initiatives by the Labour Ministry to be launched in the Iconic Week being celebrated by the Ministry from March 7 to 13.

The objective of National Youth Parliament Festival is to hear the voice of youth between 18 and less than 25 years of age, who will join various careers in coming years, including public services.National Youth Parliament Festival (NYPF) is based on the idea given by Prime Minister in his Mann Ki Baat Address on 31st December 2017.

Taking inspiration from the idea of Prime Minister, the first NYPF 2019 was organised from 12 January to 27 February 2019 at District, State & National level with the theme Be the Voice of New India and Find solutions and Contribute to Policy.

National Youth Festival is celebrated every year from 12th to 16th January. 12th January being the birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, is observed as National Youth Day. This year, NYPF is also being organized along with the National Youth Festival.

Vudris the local name for Karewas in Kashmiri language.

In the Kashmiri dialect,the term Karewa means elevated table land.

Firstly, this term wasused by Godwin Austin in 1859 and later on by Lydekker in 1878forunconsolidated to semi-consolidated sand clay conglomerate sequence.

Karewas are thethick deposits of glacial clay and other materials embedded with moraines.These are unconsolidatedlacustrine deposits.Lacustrine means associated with lakes

A Made in India Petascale Supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” has been installed at IIT Roorkee on Monday by B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman, Board of Governors, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. The establishment of 1.66 PFLOPS (Peta Floating-Point Operations Per Second) supercomputing at IIT Roorkee by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has been built under the approach of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

The new high-performance computational (HPC) facility would aid researchers to solve complex problems of national importance and global significance. The new HPC infrastructure will serve as an essential compute environment for the modern-day research along with their theoretical and experimental work.”

By March 8, almost all Indians were evacuated from Ukraine, under a special effort codenamed Operation Ganga, starting from February 24, when the invasion began. The last of the stranded Indians, from Sumy University, have also been evacuated to safety in neighbouring Poland, Romania etc.

This was possible with support from the Russian and Ukraine governments under the `Green Corridor’ facility they have jointly arranged.

Its the first of its kind mission, with the aim of monitoring the unpredictable and active Sun and help protect the Earth from its outbursts.

ESA Vigil will be the first of its kind. By keeping an eagle eye on the ‘side’ of the Sun, the spacecraft will stream a constant feed of near real-time data on potentially hazardous solar activity, before it rolls into view from Earth.

The mission will give us advance warning of oncoming solar storms and therefore more time to protect spacecraft in orbit, infrastructure on the ground and explorers now and in the future, unshielded by Earth’s magnetic field and vulnerable to our star’s violent outbursts.