Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 24 May 2022

::NATIONAL::

Government relaxes family pension rules for missing Central govt employees

Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh today announced that the government has relaxed family pension rules for missing central government employees.

About:

According to the earlier rule, the next of the kin of an employee would not receive the family pension, if he went missing and the family pension would not be paid till the missing Government was declared dead in accordance with the law or till seven years had passed since he went missing.
In all cases where a government servant covered by NPS goes missing during service, the benefits of family pension will be immediately paid to the family of the missing government servant.

Significance:

In case he re-appears and resumes service, the amount paid as family pension during the intervening time of his missing period can be accordingly deducted from his salary.
The Minister said this is going to provide huge relief particularly in those regions where instances of government employees going missing are reported more frequently.

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Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets fighter jets

Two Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets fighter jets landed in Goa for trials on the Indian Navy’s Shore Based Test Facility (SBTF) to demonstrate their compatibility and suitability to operate from Indian aircraft carriers.

About:

The demonstration is expected to continue up to the first week of June.
These trials are part of demonstrations by the aircraft manufacturers to showcase the compatibility of their aircraft to fly from Indian Navy’s aircraft carriers which use a ski-jump to launch aircraft, officials stated.
Both the Rafale-M and F/A-18 are originally designed to operate from carriers with a catapult launch mechanism. The carrier would also require minor modifications to operate the aircraft, as reported earlier.

Other information:

Boeing has already demonstrated the ability of F/A-18 to take off from a similar shore-based facility at Naval Air Station Patuxent river in Maryland, U.S. in December 2020.
However, each fighter brings certain advantages while having some limitations. For instance, Rafale-M does not have a twin seater trainer while its acquisition would mean commonality with the 36 Rafale jets of the Indian Air Force.
On the other hand, the F/A-18 is a much widely employed platform with a twin seater trainer and also has an electronic warfare version which might be of interest to the Navy.

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::INTERNATIONAL::

World of Work Report

The “world of work” is being buffeted by multiple crises, says the ninth edition of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Monitor.

Key highlights:

The report says that after significant gains during the last quarter of 2021, the number of hours worked globally dropped in the first quarter of 2022, to 3.8% below the employment situation before the pandemic.
About 11.2 crore jobs might have lost between this period, according to the report.
The gender gap in India’s employment scenario is mentioned in the report on the “world of work”.
The report said both India and lower-middle-income countries excluding India experienced a deterioration of the gender gap in work hours in the second quarter of 2020.
Every 100 women at work prior to the pandemic, 12.3 women would have lost their job as an average through the entire period considered by the report.
The fresh lockdowns in China, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and the global rise in the prices of food and fuel are cited as the main reasons for the findings.
The ILO urged its member countries to take a humane approach to address the situation.

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U.S. Indo-Pacific economic plan

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 23 arrived in Japan on a two-day visit to attend a summit of the Quad leaders which is aimed at further bolstering cooperation among the member nations of the influential grouping and discussing developments in the Indo-Pacific region.

About:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate in U.S. President Joseph Biden’s unveiling of the ‘Indo-Pacific Economic Framework’ (IPEF) in Tokyo.
Modi’s attendance of the event is a significant step towards building economic ties amongst Quad countries (India, the U.S., Australia and Japan) in the Indo-Pacific.
Although officials were hesitant to bill the IPEF as a counter to the 15-nation Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the 17-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that China is a member of.
The IPEF would have a “very wide-ranging membership” and the programme was “designed to put workers at the centre with a focus on the digital economy, clean energy transition, infrastructure and resilient supply chains.

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::ECONOMY::

ASHA workers

The World Health Organisation has recognised the country’s 10.4 lakh ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers as ‘Global Health Leaders’ for their efforts in connecting the community to the government’s health programmes.

Who are ASHA workers?

ASHA workers are volunteers from within the community who are trained to provide information and aid people in accessing benefits of various healthcare schemes of the government.
They act as a bridge connecting marginalised communities with facilities such as primary health centres, sub-centres and district hospitals.
The role of these community health volunteers under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) was first established in 2005.
ASHAs are primarily married, widowed, or divorced women between the ages of 25 and 45 years from within the community. They must have good communication and leadership skills; should be literate with formal education up to Class 8, as per the programme guidelines.

How many ASHAs are there across the country?

The aim is to have one ASHA for every 1,000 persons or per habitation in hilly, tribal or other sparsely populated areas.
There are around 10.4 lakh ASHA workers across the country, with the largest workforces in states with high populations – Uttar Pradesh (1.63 lakh), Bihar (89,437), and Madhya Pradesh (77,531). Goa is the only state with no such workers, as per the latest National Health Mission data available from September 2019.

What do ASHA workers do?

They go door-to-door in their designated areas creating awareness about basic nutrition, hygiene practices, and the health services available.
They focus primarily on ensuring that women undergo ante-natal check-up, maintain nutrition during pregnancy, deliver at a healthcare facility, and provide post-birth training on breast-feeding and complementary nutrition of children.

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::SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY::

AI chips

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips has risen, with chipmakers designing different types of these chips to power AI applications such as natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, robotics, and network security across a wide variety of sectors.

About:

AI chips are built with specific architecture and have integrated AI acceleration to support deep learning-based applications.
Deep learning, more commonly known as active neural network (ANN) or deep neural network (DNN), is a subset of machine learning and comes under the broader umbrella of AI.
It combines a series of computer commands or algorithms that stimulate activity and brain structure. DNNs go through a training phase, learning new capabilities from existing data.
DNNs can then inference, by applying these capabilities learned during deep learning training to make predictions against previously unseen data.
Deep learning can make the process of collecting, analysing, and interpreting enormous amounts of data faster and easier.
AI chips generally contain processor cores as well as several AI-optimised cores (depending on the scale of the chip) that are designed to work in harmony when performing computational tasks.

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