27th-28th February, 2023

1. Central Govt is planning to set up 10 Clean Plant Centres under the ‘Atmanirbhar Clean Plant Program’, which was announced in the Union Budget 2023-24.
2. Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has discovered upon a 1,300-year-old stupa right in the middle of a mining site in Odisha’s Jajpur district.
3. Department of Telecom (DoT) has offered the usage of 5G test bed free of cost to start-ups and MSMEs recognised by the government, up to January 2024.
4. National Statistical Office (NSO) has released the Periodic Labour Force Survey for June-July 2021-22.
5. India and the UK have officially launched the Young Professionals Scheme to allow degree-holding Indian nationals (between 18-30 years) to live and work in Britain for up to two years.
6. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will be the Chief Guest and Keynote Speaker at the 8th Raisina Dialogue 2023 to be held in Taj Palace Hotel, Diplomatic Enclave, New Delhi from March 2-3.
7. Two-day Bird Survey Dharoi 2023 was organized in north Gujarat.
8. Odisha launched India’s first AI Chatbot for the agricultural sector ‘Ama KrushAI’ at the valedictory session of ‘Krushi Odisha 2023’.
9. Mizoram will soon export ‘bird’s eye chilli’ or ‘Mizo chilli’ of the state to the United States for the first time.
10. WHO, UNICEF, World Bank, UN Population Fund, and UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs have released the “Trends in Maternal Mortality 2000 to 2020” report.
11. New Delhi-based ICRIER Prosus Centre for Internet and the Digital Economy (IPCIDE) has released the “State of India’s Digital Economy” report.
12. Kotak Mahindra Bank has launched the ‘Kotak fyn’, an integrated portal developed to offer comprehensive digital banking and value-added services to its business banking and corporate clients.
13. Bank of Maharashtra (BoM) has launched its own private cloud platform, ‘MAHABANK NAKSHATRA’, to strengthen its Digital Infrastructure.
14. SBI has launched the new fund offer (NFO) for the SBI Dividend Fund.
15. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has appointed Indo-Canadian Afshan Khan as the coordinator of the ‘Scaling Up Nutrition Movement’ or SUN Movement.
16. February 28 – National Science Day; Theme – Global Science for Global well being
17. Lionel Messi won The Best FIFA Men’s Player Prize for 2022.
18. Karnataka Bank was awarded with ‘Prathista Puraskar’ under ‘Digidhan Awards 2021-22’ by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
19. Vignesh N R has become India’s 80th Grandmasters.
20. Om Prakash Kohli (Indian politician who was the Governor of Gujarat from 2014 to 2019) has passed away.

National News

1. Central Govt is planning to set up 10 Clean Plant Centres under the ‘Atmanirbhar Clean Plant Program’, which was announced in the Union Budget 2023-24.
   • Imported bio-organism must be kept in quarantine for some time to check their disease, adaptability etc.
   • Imported plants used to be kept in quarantine for two years. These centres will reduce the time-period for quarantine for horticultural crops to six months.
   • The Clean Plant Centres will provide services of disease diagnostic, therapeutics, multiplying of plants and generation of mother plants.
   • The centres will be fully funded by the Centre. The govt will invest Rs 2,200 crores in these centres by 2030.
   • It will be implemented in a Public Private Parternship mode in partnership with research organisations, agriculture universities and private sector partners.
   • National Horticulture Board (NHB) will be the nodal agency for setting up the clean plant programme.
2. Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has discovered upon a 1,300-year-old stupa right in the middle of a mining site in Odisha’s Jajpur district.
3. Department of Telecom (DoT) has offered the usage of 5G test bed free of cost to start-ups and MSMEs recognised by the government, up to January 2024.
4. National Statistical Office (NSO) has released the Periodic Labour Force Survey for June-July 2021-22.

5. India and the UK have officially launched the Young Professionals Scheme to allow degree-holding Indian nationals (between 18-30 years) to live and work in Britain for up to two years.
6. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will be the Chief Guest and Keynote Speaker at the 8th Raisina Dialogue 2023 to be held in Taj Palace Hotel, Diplomatic Enclave, New Delhi from March 2-3.
   • The conference is hosted by the Observer Research Foundation in partnership with the Ministry of External Affairs.

State News

1. Two-day Bird Survey Dharoi 2023 was organized in north Gujarat.
2. Odisha launched India’s first AI Chatbot for the agricultural sector ‘Ama KrushAI’ at the valedictory session of ‘Krushi Odisha 2023’.
   • Odisha CM – Naveen Patnaik
   • Odisha Governor – L Ganesha

Agriculture and Rural Development

1. Mizoram will soon export ‘bird’s eye chilli’ or ‘Mizo chilli’ of the state to the United States for the first time.

Reports and Indices

1. WHO, UNICEF, World Bank, UN Population Fund, and UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs have released the “Trends in Maternal Mortality 2000 to 2020” report.

Global Scenario –

• In 2020, an estimated 2,87,000 women globally died from a maternal cause, equivalent to almost 800 maternal deaths every day, and approximately one every two minutes.
• The global MMR in 2020 was estimated at 223 maternal deaths per 100 000 live births, down from 227 in 2015 and from 339 in 2000 – a reduction of 34.3% over the full 20-year period.
• The average annual rate of reduction (ARR) in the global MMR from 2000 to 2020 was 2.1%.
• India (24,000), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (22,000) and Ethiopia (10,000) account for 3%, 7.5% and 3.6% of global maternal deaths, respectively.
• India’s MMR is 103.

2. New Delhi-based ICRIER Prosus Centre for Internet and the Digital Economy (IPCIDE) has released the “State of India’s Digital Economy” report.
   • The report focuses on the indicators which are specific to the Indian society.
   • The report traces the digital transformation through its four interrelated stages: Connect, Harness, Innovate and Protect, or the CHIP framework.
   • The progress is examined for three types of agents: people, businesses and government.

Banking and Economy

1. Kotak Mahindra Bank has launched the ‘Kotak fyn’, an integrated portal developed to offer comprehensive digital banking and value-added services to its business banking and corporate clients.
2. Bank of Maharashtra (BoM) has launched its own private cloud platform, ‘MAHABANK NAKSHATRA’, to strengthen its Digital Infrastructure.
   • Mahabank Nakshatra is the private cloud platform of the bank, which will facilitate high-performance cloud capabilities for digital infrastructure and hosting applications of the bank.
   • The bank has also strengthened its asset monitoring mechanism through adoption of predictive machine learning model, which can alert well in advance whether a borrowing account will move into special mention account (SMA)-0 (principal or interest payment not overdue for more than 30 days).

3. SBI has launched the new fund offer (NFO) for the SBI Dividend Fund.
   • Aggressive investors who primarily come to equities as an asset class for growth can skip the offer.
   • The fund manager will invest a minimum of 65% of the corpus in dividend-paying companies, with the portfolio built in a manner that the overall dividend yield is at least 50% more than that offered by the Nifty50 pack.

Appointments

1. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has appointed Indo-Canadian Afshan Khan as the coordinator of the ‘Scaling Up Nutrition Movement’ or SUN Movement.
   • The SUN Movement is a country-driven initiative led by 65 nations and four Indian states united in their mission to end all forms of malnutrition by 2030.

Important Days

1. February 28 – National Science Day; Theme – Global Science for Global well being
   • The day commemorates the discovery of the Raman Effect by CV Raman in 1928. CV Raman has also won the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1930.

Awards

1. Lionel Messi won The Best FIFA Men’s Player Prize for 2022.
   • Alexia Putellas won The Best FIFA Women’s Player award for the second successive year in 2022.
2. Karnataka Bank was awarded with ‘Prathista Puraskar’ under ‘Digidhan Awards 2021-22’ by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
   • Purpose – for achieving target with highest percentage in BHIM-UPI transactions in private sector bank category

Sports

1. Vignesh N R has become India’s 80th Grandmasters.
   • Brother of Vignesh N R, Visakh N R was already India’s 59^th grandmaster.
   • They are India’s first pair of brothers who became grandmaster.

Miscellaneous

1. Om Prakash Kohli (Indian politician who was the Governor of Gujarat from 2014 to 2019) has passed away

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