• The Prime Minister has recently inaugurated the Pravasi Bhartiya Diwas Convention.

Pravasi Bharatiya Divas

• It is celebrated once in every two years to strengthen the engagement of the overseas Indian community with the Government of India and reconnect them with their roots.
• The 16th PBD Convention is being held virtually on 9 January, 2021 in New Delhi.
• The theme of 16th PBD Convention 2021 is “Contributing to Aatmanirbhar Bharat”.

• Suriname President Chandrikapersad Santokhi, Curacao Prime Minister Eugene Rhuggenaath and New Zealand minister Priyanca Radhakrishnan were among 30 NRIs, and Indian-origin people and organisations who were conferred the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award recently.

Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award

• The award is the highest honour conferred by the President of India as part of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) Conventions.
• The award will be conferred on a Non-Resident Indian (NRI), Person of Indian Origin (PIO), and organisation or institution established and run by NRIs or PIOs.

• The handing over ceremony of Retractable Landing Gear Systems for Tapas and SWiFT UAVs and 18 types of filters for P-75 Submarine took place recently at DRDO laboratory, Combat Vehicles Research and Development Establishment (CVRDE), Chennai.

Tactical Airborne Platform for Aerial Surveillance-Beyond Horizon-201 (TAPAS BH-201)

• It is a long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which used to be previously referred as Rustom-II.
• It is being developed by India on the lines of the American Predator drones.

Stealth Wing Flying Testbed (SWiFT) 

• SWiFT is a precursor to India’s stealthy Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV) Ghatak.
• It is a scaled-down version of Ghatak UCAV.
• The main intent of SWiFT UAV is to demonstrate and prove the stealth technology and high-speed landing technology in autonomous mode.

• The State government of Telangana has fixed September 2022 as deadline to complete construction of the proposed Sitammasagar multi-purpose project.

Sitammasagar multi-purpose project

• The Rs. 2,700-crore Sitammasagar multi-purpose project envisages construction of a barrage across River Godavari with a storage capacity of 36.57 tmcft and a hydel power unit of 320 MW capacity.
• It aims to optimally harness the surplus waters of the Godavari for both irrigation and hydel power generation purposes.

• Arunachal Pradesh is likely to become India’s prime producer of vanadium.
• Exploration being carried out by the Geological Survey of India (GSI) has placed the eastern Himalayan State on the vanadium map of the country.

Vanadium

• It is a high-value metal used in strengthening steel and titanium.
• India is a significant consumer of vanadium, but is not a primary producer of the strategic metal.
• It is recovered as a by-product from the slag collected from the processing of vanadiferous magnetite ores (iron ore).
• India consumed 4% of about 84,000 tonnes of vanadium produced across the globe in 2017.
• China, which produces 57% of the world’s vanadium, consumed 44% of the metal. 

Gross Domestic Product Estimates

• Gross domestic product (GDP) is the monetary value of all finished goods and services made within a country during a specific period.
• India has registered an average annual GDP growth rate of 6.8 per cent since the start of economic liberalisation in 1992-93.
• According to recent estimates real GDP will fall by 7.7 per cent.
• A big reason for the contraction this year has been the disruption caused by Covid-induced lockdowns, as a result, the domestic economy had entered a technical recession.
• India’s real GDP that is, GDP without the influence of inflation in 2020-21 will be lower than the 2018-19 level.
• In other words, from the start of the next financial year, India would first have to raise its GDP back to the level it was at in 2019-20.

Culling of Infected Birds

• During culling operations, all domestic birds in an infected area, i.e., an area in which a case of bird flu has been detected, are slaughtered and their remains buried.
• In India, culling is done in a radius of one kilometre from the site of infection, which is called the ‘infected zone’.
• This means all domestic birds present in commercial farms, backyard farms or live bird markets in the infected zone are culled.
• Normally, the World Organization for Animal Health OIE says, the cervical dislocation or neck-wringing method may be used by first making the poultry unconscious.
• The OIE manual says cervical dislocation is non-invasive killing method and can be performed manually on small birds, but it is difficult in larger birds and results in operator fatigue.

Food Price Index

• It is a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities.
• It is prepared by United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
• It consists of the average of five commodity group price indices weighted by the average export shares of each of the groups over 2014-2016.
• The five indices are

1. Cereal Price Index,
2. Vegetable Oil Price Index,
3. Dairy Price Index,
4. Meat Price Index,
5. Sugar price index.

K- Shape Curve in Economy

• A K-shaped recovery occurs when, following a recession, different parts of the economy recover at different rates, times, or magnitudes.
• It describes the path of different disaggregated economic variables, such as income across different segments of society or employment in different industries, relative to one another.
• In India, households at the top of the pyramid are likely to have seen their incomes largely protected, and savings rates forced up during the lockdown.
• Meanwhile, households at the bottom are likely to have witnessed permanent hits to jobs and incomes.
• COVID has triggered an effective income transfer from the poor to the rich, this will be demand-impeding because the poor have a higher marginal propensity to consume (i.e) they tend to spend (instead of saving) a much higher proportion of their income.

India’s Silk production

• There are five major types of silk of commercial importance, obtained from different species of silkworms.
• These are Mulberry, Oak Tasar & Tropical Tasar, Muga and Eri.
• India has the unique distinction of producing all these commercial varieties of silk.
• South India is the leading silk producing area of the country and is also known for its famous silk weaving enclaves like Kancheepuram, Dharmavaram, Arni, etc.
• In India, about 97% of the raw mulberry silk is produced in the five Indian states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir.
• Apart from this all four commercially exploited varieties of silk mulberry, Muga, Eri and Tasar are produced in the North East.
• This region contributes about 21 per cent of the total silk production in the country.