Current affairs and Daily News Analysis

Union Minister for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship inaugurated the first batch of Indian Institute of Skills in Mumbai

• The institute is a joint initiative between Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (MSDE), Government of India and Tata Indian Institute of Skills.
  
• Formal agreement for setting up institute has been signed between MSDE and TATA IIS on 11th November, 2020.
  
• The first batch at TATA-Indian Institute of Skills will commence training with two courses in Factory Automation, envisaged to be the foundation for future courses and Smart Manufacturing (Industry 4.0) technology and applications.
  

Source : PIB

India’s urban mass rapid transit will mark a milestone on December 28 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to flag off the country’s first ‘driverless’ metro in Delhi

• The first ‘driverless’ train will roll out on the 38-km Line 8 or Magenta Line of the Delhi Metro, which has a 390-km-long network spread across the national capital and adjoining cities such as Noida, Gurugram, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Bahadurgarh.
  
• The Centre has also notified changes in the Metro Railways General Rules, 2020 as the previous norms did not allow driverless services.
  
• The trials of DMRC’s new ‘driverless trains’ were started in December 2017, along the 20-km stretch on Pink Line.
  
• The trials were to test the automation of the new metro trains, that were equipped with Unattended Train Operations (UTO) and CBTC (Communication Based Train Control) signalling systems.
  

Important Info :

Will all Delhi Metro trains become driverless from December 28?

• No, the driverless train operation (DTO) will only be applicable for Line 7 and Line 8 of the DMRC network which comes under the Phase III expansion.
• These corridors are equipped with an advanced signalling technology which makes the transition possible.

Source : Indian Express

Urdu author S.R. Faruqi passed away

• Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935 – 2020) was an Indian poet and an Urdu critic and theorist.
  
• He formulated fresh models of literary appreciation. He absorbed western principles of literary criticism and subsequently applied them to Urdu literature, but only after adapting them to address literary aesthetics native to Arabic, Persian, and Urdu.
  
• Dastangoi is a 16th-century Urdu oral storytelling art form. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has played significant role in its revival in the 21st century.
  
• His greatest feat, perhaps, was his mammoth novel Kai Chaand The Sare Asmaan (The Mirror of Beauty), a work that he began writing at the age of 70.
  

Awards:

• He was awarded the Saraswati Samman in 1996.
  
• The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of Padma Shri in 2009.
  

Source : The Hindu

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) released to public the initial data from Chandrayaan-2, India’s second Moon mission, which was launched on July 22, 2019

• The Orbiter, which was injected into a lunar orbit on September 2, 2019, carried eight experiments/payloads, all of which have been performing well and sending data received.
  
• The public release data archived at the Indian Space Science Data Center (ISSDC) in Byalalu, near Bengaluru is prepared in the standard, globally followed planetary data system-4 (PDS4) format for public release.
  
• The set released recently is basic data — what ISRO calls Level-0 and Level-1 datasets — prepared using PDS4 standards. The ISSDC is the nodal center of planetary data archive for planetary missions of ISRO.
  

Source : Times of India

The Directorate of Estates, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs dedicated to the nation, a new Web Portal and Mobile App, e-Sampada

• The new application provides a single window for all these services including allotment for over one lakh government residential accommodations, office space allotment to government organisations, booking of 1,176 holiday home rooms and venues like 5, Ashoka Road for social functions etc.
  
• In its endeavour to provide ‘One Nation, One System’, the erstwhile four websites (gpra.nic.in, eawas.nic.in, estates.gov.in, holidayhomes.nic.in), and two Mobile Apps (m-Awas & m-Ashoka5) of the Directorate of Estates have been integrated into one.
  

Source : PIB

In a paper published in the journal Endangered Species Research, authors described a new whale song, suggesting the existence of a population that was previously unknown

• Researchers have recorded the unique song off the coast of Oman in the northern Arabian Sea, off the western Chagos Archipalego, and off Madagascar in the southwestern Indian Ocean.
  
• Since it is the only blue whale song identified by them in the western Arabian Sea, researchers have called it the “Northwest Indian Ocean”.
  
• Researchers believe the source is either the blue whale or Bryde’s whale since both species have been documented off Oman previously.
  
• Significance: Given that this song-type has not been reported before, the presence of it across a large geographic region indicates the likely existence of a previously undefined population of blue whales in the Western Indian Ocean.
  

Important Info :

• Not all whales sing. Only some, such as the baleen whale, have been found to sing songs.
• Whales use songs to communicate and socialise. Their songs can be characterised as clicks, whistles and pulsed calls or a composition of “moans, snores, chirps and cries”.
  • Whales use clicks to navigate and identify their surroundings as the sound bounces off objects, helping whales determine their shapes.
  • Whales use whistles and pulses, on the other hand, during social activities.
• Whale songs can last between 6-35 minutes, and some individual whales have been found to sing for 22 hours.
• Can humans hear whale songs? Whale songs are typically below 4 kHz in frequency (human hearing range is between 20 Hz to 20 kHz), thus being inaudible to human ears.

Source : Indian Express