Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 22 January 2022

::NATIONAL::

Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana - National Rural Livelihood Mission (DAY-NRLM) has observed ‘Agri Nutri Garden Week’ from 10th to 17th January, 2022.
It aims to create an awareness campaign and encouraging establishment of ‘Agri Nutri Gardens’ in the rural households.

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It is the Mission’s agenda to support every rural poor household to have Agri Nutri Garden to fulfill the need of the family’s nutrition and any excess production can also be sold for income generation.
In line with Prime Minister’s vision of enhancing strength of Rural Economy and his clarion call of AtmaNirbhar Bharat, Rural India is showing the way with establishment of over 78 lakh Agri Nutri Gardens towards ensuring Food and Nutritional Security in Rural India. A total of 76,664 ‘Agri Nuti Gardens’ were established in this week against the target of 7500.
The initiative is also helping in promoting nutritional awareness, education and behavioral change in rural areas involving farm women and school children, harnessing traditional knowledge through the local recipe to overcome malnutrition and implementing nutrition-sensitive agriculture through homestead agriculture and Nutri-garden.
As part of this programme, DAY-NRLM also organized a webinar on 13th January, 2022, in which over 2000 women participated from 700 locations.

Supreme Court upholding the constitutional validity of 27% OBC reservation in All India Quota (AIQ) seats in the NEET for UG and PG medical courses.
The court has said that merit cannot be reduced to narrow definitions of performance in an open competitive examination.
Distributive justice is concerned with the fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of social cooperation among diverse persons with competing needs and claims.

SC gave following reasons to approve 27% OBC reservation:

Articles 15(4) and 15 (5) are not an exception to Article 15 (1) of Constitution of India,which itself sets out the principle of substantive equality (including the recognition of existing inequalities).
Merit cannot be reduced to narrow definitions of performance in an open competitive examination which only provides formal equality of opportunity.
High scores in an examination are not a proxy for merit. Merit should be socially contextualized and reconceptualized as an instrument that advances social goods like equality.

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India has extended financial assistance to the tune of $ 527 million ($ 267 million as grant and $ 260 million as Line of Credit) towards the Metro Express project.
The 26-km long Metro project is being implemented in two phases - Phase I connecting Port Louis and Rose Hill was completed and e-inaugurated jointly by the two Prime Ministers in 2019. Phase II connecting Rose Hill to Curepipe is underway and is expected to be completed by December 2022.
The Social Housing project is one of the five high-profile infrastructure projects identified for implementation under the $ 353 million Special Economic Package (SEP) extended to the Government of Mauritius (GOM) in 2016.
The total cost of the project is $ 44.995 million - comprising grant assistance of $ 20 million under the SEP and Line of Credit support of $ 25 million (from the LOC of $ 500 million extended in 2017).
The Civil Service College would be set up under an MoU signed between India and Mauritius during the visit of Jugnauth to India in 2017 through a grant assistance of $ 4.74 million.
The 8 MW Solar PV Farm project at Tamarind Falls, Henrietta is financed under a LOC of $ 500 million extended in 2017.

The first BRICS Sherpas meeting of 2022 was held virtually on January 18-19 under the Chinese chairship with the members thanking India for its BRICS chairship in 2021.

About Sherpas:

A Sherpa is a personal representative of the leader of a member country at an internationalSummit such as the G8, G20 etc.
The term is derived from the Nepalese Sherpa people, who serve as guides for mountaineers in the Himalayas.
They coordinate the agenda, seek consensus, and participate in a series of pre-Summit consultations to help negotiate their leaders’ positions.
There is only one Sherpa per Summit for each member country.

The Minister of Commerce and Industry Shri Piyush Goyal has said simplicity of operations and transparency should be the focus of the National Single Window System (NSWS).

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The digital platform of NSWS facilitates investors to identify and apply for approvals.
It supports information across 32 Central Ministries/ Departments and the platform has 14 States onboard namely Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Goa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The process for inclusion of 6 more States is in progress.
The Know Your Approvals (KYA) service is live on the NSWS with 544 approvals across 32 Central Ministries/ Departments. A total of 3,259 approvals are listed.
The first approval through the NSWS portal has been granted on 11 January 2022 to M/s CMR-Kataria Recycling Private Limited for the Vehicle Scrappage Facility RVSF, Kheda, Gujarat with a capacity of 67,000 vehicles.

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It is a first of its kind Mobile Diagnostic Laboratory (I-LAB) capable of performing both RT-PCR and ELISA tests -- for Northeast India.
The mobile lab has bio-safety facility and is capable of performing both RT-PCR and ELISA tests. It can also be utilised for testing other infectious diseases like TB, HIV, and therefore will remain relevant even in post-Covid times.
The Mobile Lab Technology will be rolled out gradually in other states of the Northeast as the region has unique climatic and topographical conditions.
It has been developed with support from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) under the Ministry of Science & Technology, government of India, and is meant to provide Covid testing access to rural and remote parts of Northeast, a release from the Ministry said.