Daily Current Capsules

14 June 2023

ANJADIP

• Anjadip, the third of the eight anti-submarine shallow water crafts, was launched at the Larsen and Toubro Kattupalli Port.
• It was built by Kolkata-based Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers for the Indian Navy.
• The vessel is named after the island of Anjadip off the Karwar Port, Karnataka, which signifies its strategic maritime importance.
• The island is connected to the mainland by a breakwater and is part of INS Kadamba. 

Anti-submarine shallow water crafts (ASW SWC ships)

• The contract for building eight ASW SWC ships was signed between MoD and Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers (GRSE), Kolkata on 29 Apr 19.
• As per the build strategy, four ships are being built at GRSE, Kolkata, and the construction of a balance of four ships has been subcontracted to M/s L&T Shipbuilding, Kattupalli. 
• Anjadip belongs to the ‘Arnala’ class of ships, whose contract was signed by GRSE, Kolkata, and the Ministry of Defence in April 2019.
• Arnala class of ships will replace the in-service Abhay class ASW Corvettes of the Indian Navy and are designed to undertake anti-submarine operations in coastal waters, Low-Intensity Maritime Operations (LIMO), and Mine Laying operations including subsurface surveillance in littoral waters.
• The 77 m long ASW SWC ships have a displacement of 900 tons with a maximum speed of 25 knots and endurance of 1800 NM.
• The ASW SWC ships will have over 80% indigenous content, thereby ensuring that large-scale defence production is executed by Indian manufacturing units, generating employment and capability enhancement within the country.
• The previous two ships launched were Androth and Arnala on March 21 and December 22, respectively.
• The 4th ship of the Survey Vessel (Large), named Sanshodhak, was also launched at the same L&T Kattupalli Port on June 13

SANSHODHAK

• ‘Sanshodhak’, the fourth of four ships of the Survey Vessels (Large) (SVL) Project, being built by L&T/ GRSE for the Indian Navy was launched on 13 Jun 23 at Kattupalli, Chennai.
• The ship named ‘Sanshodhak’, meaning ‘Researcher’, signifies the primary role of the ship as a Survey Vessel.

Know! about SVL Project

• The contract for building four SVL ships was signed between MoD and Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers (GRSE), Kolkata on 30 Oct 18.
• As per the build strategy, the first ship would be built at GRSE, Kolkata, and construction of the remaining three ships up to the outfitting stage, has been subcontracted to M/s L&T Shipbuilding, Kattupalli.
• The first three ships of the project, Sandhayak, Nirdeshak, and Ikshak were launched on 05 Dec 21, 26 May 22, and 26 Nov 22 respectively.
• SVL ships will replace the existing Sandhayak Class survey ships, with new-generation hydrographic equipment, to collect oceanographic data.
• The Survey Vessel (Large) ships are 110 m long, 16 m wide with a displacement of 3,400 tons.
• The hull of these ships is made from indigenously developed DMR 249-A steel manufactured by the Steel Authority of India Limited.

Survey Vessel (Large) ships – Purpose

• With the capability to carry four Survey Motor Boats and an integral helicopter, the primary role of the ships would be to undertake full-scale coastal and deep-water hydrographic surveys of Ports and navigational channels.
• The ships would also be deployed for collecting oceanographic and geophysical data for defense as well as civil applications.
• In their secondary role, the ships are capable of providing limited defence, HADR, and can serve as Hospital ship during emergencies.
• The Survey Vessels Large will have over 80% indigenous content by cost, ensuring defence production by Indian manufacturing units

Global DPI Summit

• The Global DPI Summit, as the side event of the third meeting of the G20 Digital Economy Working Group, was successfully organized
• The summit was attended by 150 foreign delegates from around 50 countries and over 250 delegates in-person and more than 2000 persons attended the summit live.
• Global DPI Exhibition showcased 14 experience zones comprising DPI-based use cases in Identity, Payment, Paperless Governance, Digital Agriculture, Education & Skilling, Healthcare, and the Digital India Journey.
• During the summit, India signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with four countries namely Armenia, Sierra Leone, Suriname, and Antigua and Barbuda on sharing INDIA STACK i.e. successful digital solutions implemented at the population scale.

Know! about India Stack

• India Stack is a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilize a unique digital Infrastructure to solve India’s hard problems towards presence-less, paperless, and cashless service delivery.

The four distinct technology layers provided are

• Presenceless layer: Where a universal biometric digital identity allows people to participate in any service from anywhere in the country.
• Paperless layer: Where digital records move with an individual’s digital identity, eliminating the need for massive amounts of paper collection and storage.
• Cashless layer: Where a single interface to all the country’s bank accounts and wallets to democratize payments.
• Consent layer: Which allows data to move freely and securely to democratize the market for data.

The following APIs are considered to be a core part of the India Stack.

• Aadhaar Authentication
• Aadhaar e-KYC
• eSign
• Digital Locker
• Unified Payment Interface (UPI)
• Digital User Consent – still a work in progress.

The following APIs are also considered to be societal platforms built on similar principles like India Stack:

• GSTN – The Goods and Services Tax Network
• BBPS – The Bharat Bill Payment System
• ETC – Electronic Toll Collection (known under the brand FASTag)

Utility

• Citizens: Brings millions of Indians into the formal economy by reducing friction.
• Software ecosystem: Fosters innovation to build products for Financial Inclusion, healthcare & educational services at scale.
• Government: Brings a paradigm shift in the way government services are delivered in a transparent, accountable, and leakage-free model.

India’s tech and UPI payment mode

• The Modular Open-Source Identity Platform, or MOSIP, an open-source foundational identity platform developed by the International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru, has partnered with the National Civil Registration Authority of the western African country of Sierra Leone, to develop a digital ID pilot project on the lines of India’s Aadhar.
• India’s successful digital journey, from creating Aadhar–a unique digital identity that is accepted across the country–to creating a wider set of open APIs called India Stack, has ushered in a digital revolution around the globe.
• Eighty million people in the world have got their identity using MOSIP and we are working with eleven countries.
• As many as six nations, including Sri Lanka, Morocco, the Philippines, Guinea, Ethiopia, and the Togolese Republic, are already using the platform.
• Apart from these countries, Tunisia, Samoa, Uganda, and Nigeria have also expressed their willingness to adopt the Indian model.
• India Stack is a collection of open APIs and public goods that aim to make identity, data, and payments easy and viable for all.
• The primary components of the India stack are a presence-less layer, a paperless layer, a faceless layer, and a consent layer.
• A successful example of India Stack is that Indians completed over 8 billion UPI transactions to the tune of over 237 billion USD in January alone this year
• Digital Locker, another division of India Stack, provides Indians with a paperless platform to protect their documents in a government-supervised locker.
• India has been generously assisting others in developing a similar platform for the social and financial inclusion of their citizens.

Capacity building of 24th batch of civil servants from Maldives started at NCGG

• The 2-week Capacity Building Programme (CBP) for civil servants of Maldives was inaugurated at the National Centre for Good Governance (NCGG) campus, Mussoorie.
• NCGG has signed an MoU with the Government of Maldives to enhance the skills and capabilities of 1,000 civil servants in the field of public administration and governance by 2024.

National Centre for Good Governance (NCGG)

• It was set up in 2014 by the Government of India as an apex–level autonomous institution under the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.
• The Centre traces its origin to the National Institute of Administrative Research (NIAR), which was set up in 1995 by the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), the Government of India’s topmost training institute for civil services.
• NIAR was subsequently rechristened and subsumed into NCGG.
• Its head office is at New Delhi and branch office at Mussoorie.
• The NCGG has been set up to assist in bringing about governance reforms through studies, training, knowledge sharing and promotion of good ideas.
• It seeks to carry out policy relevant research and prepare case studies; curate training courses for civil servants from India and other developing countries; provide a platform for sharing of existing knowledge and pro-actively seek out and develop ideas for their implementation in the government, both at the National & International Level.”
• It also works as a think tank.

Geological Survey of India Training Institute (GSITI), Hyderabad gets Accredited as “Athi Uttam”

• The Geological Survey of India Training Institute (GSITI) functioning under the Ministry of Mines, has been awarded with the accreditation by the National Accreditation Board of Education and Training (NABET) in recognition of the yeomen services it has rendered and high standards maintained in the field of earth science training.
• The team from the Capacity Building Commission (CBC), NABET, and Quality Control of India conducted the on-site assessment and awarded the Certificate of Accreditation with the grading of Athi Uttam.

Know! about GSITI

• Established in 1976, GSITI with its headquarters at Hyderabad, has six Regional Training Divisions (RTD) located at Hyderabad, Nagpur, Jaipur, Lucknow, Kolkata and Shillong.
• Four Field Training Centers (FTCs) are also established at Chitradurga (Karnataka), Raipur (Chhattisgarh), Zawar (Rajasthan), and Kuju (Jharkhand).
• These Centers are established as per the vision of the Ministry of Mines to impart various trainings to geoscience professionals, teachers, researchers, and students in various subjects of geology.
• Thus, GSITI is a national training facility, under the Ministry of Mines that provides training and capacity building to multiple stakeholders including Central and State Departments, PSUs (MECL, ONGC, OIL, NMDC), national academic institutions (IITs, Central Universities and Colleges) and colleges.
• The institute regularly conducts courses on remote sensing under NNRMS Programme sponsored by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
• It is an institute of international repute and offers training to participants of developing nations under ITEC programme sponsored by the Ministry of External Affairs. Professionals from 75 nations have already trained by the institute.
• GSITI provides domain specific and terrain specific training programmes through its Center at Hyderabad and RTDs and FTCs located across the country.

Cholederm

• An Indian institute has for the first time developed a low-cost biomedical device that uses tissue from the pig gall bladder to rapidly heal skin wounds

Know! about Cholederm

• The tissue-engineering scaffold, called Cholederm, was developed by Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), a Thiruvananthapuram-based autonomous institution of the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
• Cholederm is a wound healing material derived from the extracellular matrix of de-cellularised gall bladder of pig and tissue engineered as membrane forms of scaffold
• Cholederm has won the approval of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) as a Class D medical device.
• Membrane forms of the scaffold, identified as Cholederm, healed different types of skin wounds including burn and diabetic wounds in rat, rabbit, or dog faster than similar products currently available in the market with minimal scarring as proved by several in-depth
• It is expected that with the introduction of Cholederm to the Indian market, the treatment cost can be reduced from Rs 10,000/- to Rs 2,000/- making it more affordable to the common man.

Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO)

• The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) is India’s national regulatory body for cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices.
• The Indian government has announced its plan to bring all medical devices, including implants and contraceptives under a review of the Central Drugs and Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO).
• Within the CDSCO, the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) regulates pharmaceutical and medical devices and is positioning within the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
• The DCGI is advised by the Drug Technical Advisory Board (DTAB) and the Drug Consultative Committee (DCC).

Central Drugs Standard Control Organization has 8 divisions:

• BA/BE
• New Drugs
• Medical Device & Diagnostics
• DCC-DTA
• Import & Registration
• Biological
• Cosmetics
• Clinical Trials

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