Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 03 January 2021

::NATIONAL::

India becomes first country thathas successfully isolated and cultured the UK-variant of Sars-CoV-2.

Key findings:

UK-variant of the virus, with all signature changes, is now successfully isolated and cultured at the National Institute of Virology (NIV) from the clinical specimens collected from UK-returnees.
Sars-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, was being tracked through the countrywide network of ICMR-laboratories since early days of the epidemic in India.
No country has yet reported successful isolation and culture of the UK variant, according to ICMR.
Vero cell lines were used by the scientists of ICMR-NIV to culture the UK-variant of the virus.
India has reported 29 cases of the new coronavirus variant, that is spreading rapidly around Britain and other countries, within five days of tracing its first such infection.
The new United Kingdom variant genome of Sars-CoV-2 – B.1.1.7, which is much more infectious.
It has prompted comprehensive contact tracing for co-travellers, family members and others of those who have travelled to the UK in the last 38 days.

Union Science and Technology Minister has released the report - Action Agenda for an AtmaNirbhar Bharat prepared by Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council, TIFAC in New Delhi.
He said the ideas contained in the report should be taken forward with the implementing agencies.
He also said, the ultimate outcome of the report has to be addition to quality of life and how our efforts can contribute to Atmanirbhar Bharat.
He said, the comprehensive report on Action Agenda for an AtmaNirbhar Bharat is a consequential follow-up of the TIFAC’s White Paper on Focused Interventions for Make in India: post COVID -19 which was released earlier in July this year.

India hasbegun its two-year tenure as a non-permanent member of the powerful organ of the world body.
India will sit in the 15-nation United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for the 2021-22 term as a non-permanent member - the eighth time that the country has had a seat on the powerful horseshoe table.
In 2021, India, Norway, Kenya, Ireland and Mexico join non-permanent members Estonia, Niger, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tunisia and Vietnam and the five permanent members China, France, Russia, UK and the US in the Council.
India will be UNSC President in August 2021 and will preside over the Council again for a month in 2022.
The presidency of the Council is held by each of the members in turn for one month, following the English alphabetical order of the Member States names.

The National Capital Region Transport Corporation (NCRTC) has awarded a contract to a Chinese company, Shanghai Tunnel Engineering Company Limited, for the construction of a 5.6-kilometre underground stretch, from New Ashok Nagar to Sahibabad, of the Delhi-Meerut RRTS project.
The NCRTC, which is executing the country's first Regional Rapid Rail Transit System (RRTS).

About:

The 82-km-long Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut RRTS corridor is being funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and procurement is governed by the guidelines of the bank and the government.
According to the ADB's procurement guidelines, vendors from all member countries of the bank are eligible to participate in the bidding process without any discrimination.
The NCRTC had invited bids for the construction of the tunnel from New Ashok Nagar to Sahibabad of Delhi Ghaziabad Meerut RRTS corridor on November 9, 2019.
Five companies submitted technical bids and all the five bidders qualified in the technical bid evaluation.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has successfully achieved to develop Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG).
The DRDO Young Scientist Laboratory for Quantum Technologies (DYSL-QT), a DRDO facility based in Mumbai, has developed a QRNG which has the ability to detect random quantum events and convert those into a stream of binary digits.
The facility has developed a fiber-optic branch path based QRNG.
Branch path-based QRNG relies on the principle that if a single photon falls on a balanced beam splitter.
It will take either of the beam-splitter output paths randomly. As the path chosen by the photon is random, the randomness is translated to a sequence of binary digits, also called bits.