Current Affairs for BANK, IBPS Exams - 07 December 2021

::National::

Pratham Education Foundation CEO Rukmini Banerjee honored with 2021 Yidan Award for Education Development

Pratham CEO Dr Rukmini Banerji is this year’s recipient of the prestigious Yidan Prize for Education Development for her work on improving children’s learning levels.
The Yidan Prize is awarded by the Yidan Prize Foundation — a global philanthropic education foundation working on progress and change in education — and nine people have received it since its inception in 2016. Other than this, the foundation also awards Yidan Prize for Education Research which has been given to Professor Eric A. Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow and Professor, Hoover Institution of Stanford University this year. Each laureate is awarded HK$ 30 million—approximately US$ 3.9 million—half of which is a project fund to help them scale up their work.
According to Dr. Banerji, the prize will allow Pratham to work towards the future by expanding their work with younger children. She has done crucial work through the ASER assessment approach and the ‘Teaching at the Right Level’ programme.
There could be many reasons for that but one is that children come into school already with a disadvantage. Maybe you have a family that’s not very educated; maybe you’ve not had enough pre-school, readiness preparation… We have been thinking in the last few years that doing things differently in the early years, the preschool years, first and second grade is important.

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::International::

Mathematician Nikhil Srivastava selected for the inaugural AMS's CiprianiFoyce Award

Indian-American mathematician Nikhil Srivastava, an associate professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, and Adam Marcus and Daniel Spielman, was bestowed the First CiprianFoias Prize.
They were awarded in Operator Theory by the American Mathematical Society (AMS).
Adam Marcus carries the Chair of Combinatorial Analysis at the EcolePolytechniqueFederale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
Daniel Spielman is a Sterling Professor of Computer Science, a professor of statistics and data science, and a professor of mathematics.
The $5,000 award has been presented to Nikhil Srivastava to promote and propose techniques to know the appropriate polynomial of matrices, including iterative sparsification.
Nikhil Srivastava had collectively won the George Polya Prize in 2014 and the Held prize in 2021.
The award acknowledges their highly original work that started and improved methods for learning the characteristic polynomial of matrices, particularly the iterative sparsification method (also in collaboration with Batson) and interlacing polynomials.

::Economy::

19 of 22 economic indicators at levels higher than during pre-Covid times: Govt

Citing the latest data related to the High Frequency Indicators (HFIs), the Centre has said that the economy is showing ‘strong signs’ of recovery, adding that among the 22 HFIs, full recovery has been achieved in 19.
The levels of these 19 economic indicators, the Centre said, are higher in September, October and November this year, as compared to their pre-pandemic figures, during the same months in 2019.
“High Frequency indicators are being monitored to track the progress of economic recovery in India since the first Covid-19 case was reported in January 2020. Among the 19 indicators which have recorded full recovery, the improvement in some is at way more than 100 per cent.
These include E-way bill volume, merchandise exports, coal production, rail freight etc. This suggests that not only is the recovery complete, the economic growth is now gathering momentum over the pre-pandemic levels of output,” news agency PTI quoted officials as saying.
As per the latest data, E-way bill volume was at ₹7.4 crore in October 2021, up 139 per cent from October 2019. The rise for merchandise imports, exports, coal production, rail freight traffic etc. was recorded at 146 per cent, 135 per cent, 131 per cent and 125 per cent, respectively. Fertiliser sales, power consumption, cement production, port cargo traffic, fuel consumption, IIP and 8-core industries are all above pre-Covid levels as well.
The only three indicators which did not record cent per cent improvement are steel consumption (at 99 per cent of 2019 levels), domestic auto sales (86 per cent) and air passenger traffic (66 per cent).

PM Modi inaugurates several projects worth Rs 18,000 crore in Uttarakhand

Prime Minister NarendraModi has inaugurated and laid the foundation stone of multiple projects worth around 18,000 crore rupees at Dehradun in Uttarakhand.
Speaking on the occasion, the Prime Minister said, in the last five years, the Centre has approved schemes worth more than one lakh crore rupees for the development of Uttarakhand.
The Prime Minister said, India is moving ahead with the intention of investing more than 100 lakh crore rupees on modern infrastructure. MrModi said, India’s policy today is of ‘Gatishakti’, to work twice or thrice as fast.
He said, the reconstruction of KedarDham in the State has not only increased the number of devotees coming for Darshan, but has also provided many opportunities for employment and self-employment to the local people.
The seven projects inaugurated by the Prime Minister, consist of initiatives focusing on making travel safer by tackling the problem of chronic landslides in the region. He also inaugurated the 120 MW Vyasi Hydroelectric Project, built over Yamuna river at the cost of over 1,700 crore rupees, along with a Himalayan Culture Centre in Dehradun.
The 11 projects for which foundation was laid include the Delhi-Dehradun Economic Corridor which will be built at a cost of around 8,300 crore rupees. It will significantly reduce the travel time from Delhi to Dehradun from six hours to around 2.5 hours. It will have Asia’s largest wildlife elevated corridor of 12 kilometres for unrestricted wildlife movement. It will also boost inter-state tourism.

::Science and tech::

Picked for Nasa’s astronaut class, Indian origin Anil Menon is with SpaceX too

Nasa-turned-SpaceX flight surgeon Anil Menon is among the 10 latest trainee astronauts who will join the 2021 class of the American space agency as it plans for the first human missions to the moon in more than 50 years.
Apart from Anil Menon, a firefighter turned Harvard professor, a former member of the national cycle team and a pilot who led the first-ever all-woman F-22 formation in combat have been picked by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for its new astronaut candidate class in four years.
They were chosen among the more than 12,000 applicants and will now report for duty in January at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, where they will undergo two years of training.
Born to Indian and Ukrainian parents and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Menon is a lieutenant colonel in the US air force and was SpaceX’s first flight surgeon.
He served Nasa as the crew flight surgeon for various expeditions on the International Space Station (ISS). Menon started as a Nasa flight surgeon in 2014 and supported four long-duration crew members on ISS as the deputy crew surgeon for Soyuz missions Soyuz 39 and Soyuz 43 and prime crew surgeon for Soyuz 52.
Menon is an actively practising emergency medicine physician with fellowship training in wilderness and aerospace medicine. He was the first responder during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal and the 2011 Reno Air Show accident, according to his profile on the Nasa website.
He graduated in neurobiology from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1999 and got his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from California’s Stanford University in 2004. He has a doctor of medicine as well from Stanford Medical School.

::Sport::

UNIX signs Jasprit Bumrah as brand ambassador

UNIX is a popular Indian brand which offers latest and widest range of mobile accessories for your smartphones. Since its inception in 2006, UNIX has been headquartered in Mumbai and a manufacturing facility in Gujarat.
With 15 years of industry experience and 2 million-plus customers, Unix has a favorable voice of customers for its quality and popular products.
Chargers, Earphones, Data Cables, Power Banks, Wireless Speakers, Smartphone Batteries, Bluetooth neckbands and TWS, many of the above manufactured in India and are marketed across the length and breadth of India through their vast network of Super Stockists, Dealers and Distributors.