National Achievement Survey 2021

In News: Ministry of Education releases National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2021 report.

About NAS

– The Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education releases National Achievement Survey (NAS) report.
– The survey assesses the health of school education system in the country by conducting comprehensive evaluation survey of children’s learning competencies at classes III, V, VIII and X with a cycle period of three years.
– It reflects the overall assessment of school education system. The last NAS was held in 2017.

Objective of NAS

– The objective of NAS is to evaluate children’s progress and learning competencies as an indicator of the efficiency of the education system, so as to take appropriate steps for remedial actions at different levels.
– It helps to unravel the gaps in learning and will support state/UT governments in developing long term, mid-term and short-term interventions to improve learning levels and orient on differential planning based on NAS data.
– The achievement tests along with the questionnaires, i.e., pupil questionnaire, teacher questionnaire and school questionnaire are developed and translated in 22 different languages by NCERT.

About NAS 2021

– The NAS 2021 was held on 12.11.2021 at all India level and covered (a) Government Schools (Central Government and State Government); (b) Government Aided Schools; and (c) Private Unaided Schools.
– Subjects covered are Language, Mathematics & EVS for class 3 & 5; Language, Mathematics, Science & Social Science for class 8 and Language, Mathematics, Science, Social Science and English for class 10. 

PRAGATI Interaction

In News: Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi chaired the meeting of 40th edition of PRAGATI.

About PRAGATI

– PRAGATI is the ICT based multi-modal platform for Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation, involving Centre and State governments.
– PRAGATI is a unique integrated and interactive platform through which Hon’ble Prime Minister oversees the implementation of various government schemes, grievances, state and central related projects & programmes by directly interacting with all stake holders through Videoconferencing on a single platform.
– PRAGATI is aimed for a culture of Pro-Active Governance through online video conferencing & meetings and Timely Implementation of projects and schemes.
– It is also a robust system for bringing e-transparency and e-accountability with real-time presence and exchange among the key stakeholders.

World Economic Forum

In News: India projects itself as a reliable partner, stable economy and an attractive investment destination at World Economic at Davos.

About WEF

– Launched in 1971, WEF aims to “improve the state of the world”.
– Held every year in the Alpine ski resort of Davos, the conference puts leaders from business in the same room as key players from politics, charity and academia.
– Many use the opportunity to hold private meetings on things like investment in their countries, and as a chance to do business deals.  –High profile figures often use it to influence the global agenda.
– Every year some of the world’s top business people and politicians – plus a smattering of celebrities – gather in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum (WEF)

PARAM PORUL

In News: PARAM PORUL, a state-of the art Supercomputer at NIT Tiruchirappalli dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

Key Points

– PARAM PORUL supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the NSM, where in majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.
– PARAM PORUL system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.
– Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. has been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.      – This high end computing system will be a great value addition for the research community.

About NSM

– India has showcased its talent on building supercomputers at low cost with its PARAM series.
– To further enhance its capacity and to meet requirements, Government of India launched National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) in 2015.
– Under NSM, the plan was to connect R&D institutions and academic institutions in the country using a supercomputing grid with more than 70 high performance computing facilities.
– Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with compute capacity of 24 petaflops.
– All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operating with indigenously developed software stack.