1) National Safe Motherhood Day observed globally on 11 April
History of National Safe Motherhood Day:
•At the request of WRAI, an alliance of 1800 organizations, in 2003, the Government of India declared April 11th, the anniversary of Kasturba Gandhi’s birth, as National Safe Motherhood Day. India is the 1st country in the world to have socially declared a National Safe Motherhood Day.
•Every year WRAI members select a nationwide advocacy theme for Safe Motherhood Day, and WRAI members carry out activities and full-scale campaigns throughout the country. The goal of these annual campaigns, launched on National Safe Motherhood Day, is to increase awareness that every woman has a right to live and survive pregnancy and childbirth.
2) MHRD launches ‘Bharat Padhe Online’ campaign
•The Ministry of Human Resource Development has launched a campaign titled ‘Bharat Padhe Online’. The campaign has been launched for Crowd Sourcing of Ideas in order to improve the online education ecosystem of India. To overcome constraints of online education while promoting the available digital education platforms, the campaign seeks to invite all the best brains of the country to share suggestions/solutions directly with HRD Ministry.
•The solutions and suggestions under this campaign can be shared on bharatpadheonline.mhrd@gmail.com and on twitter by using #BharatPadheOnline. The students and teachers are the main target audience of the campaign titled ‘Bharat Padhe Online’. This campaign requires all fellow Indians to participate in order to intensify online education in India.
3) CSIR-NCL & BEL ink partnership to developed IR Thermometer and OEU
•CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) Pune, Maharashtra has designed and developed Digital IR Thermometer and Oxygen Enrichment Unit (OEU) to assist within the mitigation of the Coronavirus outbreak. To speed-up, the project NCL has partnered with Bharat Electronics Ltd, Pune (BEL).
4) India ranks high on “Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker”
•The “Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker” has identified India’s response to Covid-19 as one of the most stringent in the world. This data are based on tracking 73 countries. This tracker is created by researchers from Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. The tracker is designed to systematically record government responses worldwide and aggregate the scores into a common ‘Stringency Index’.
•Some of the other countries to score a perfect 100 in the tracker are Israel, Mauritius, New Zealand and South Africa. Czech Republic, Itay, Lebanon and France scored in the 90s in the index. Germany and the United States have scored below these countries in the 80s, while the United Kindom scored in 70s.
5) Bharat Biotech in tie-up with FluGen to develop ‘CoroFlu’ vaccine
•The vaccine is being developed on the basis of FluGen’s flu vaccine candidate known as M2SR, a self-limited version of the influenza virus. It induces an immune response against the flu. The vaccine will be built by FluGen’s lab that inserts gene sequences from SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19 into M2SR so that the novel vaccine will also induce immunity against the coronavirus.
6) FIFA’s latest ranking: India retains 108th slot
•India football team retained its 108th spot in the latest FIFA rankings. While Belgium ranked first and world champion France is in 2nd place and Brazil is at 3rd spot. In the wake of the coronavirus (Covid-19) epidemic the qualifier tournaments have been postponed for the FIFA World Cup and other major games at the international level.
