General Awareness

AWARDS AND HONOURS - December 2018

Dec 2018

Aug 08, 2020

UNESCO Recognises Venkatraipur and Noliasahi of Odisha as Tsunami Ready

In a first, two coastal villages of Odisha were recognised as being "Tsunami Ready" by UNESCO for their overall preparedness to face the calamity.
With it Odisha became the first state in the country to have such villages and the country the first in the Indian Ocean region to achieve the honour from the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO.
The two coastal villages are Venkatraipur (Boxipalli) village of Rangeilunda block in Ganjam district and Noliasahi village of Ersama block in Jagatsinghpur district.
The certificate of recognition was handed over to the communities of Venkatraipur and Noliasahi in a virtual event.
This recognition has made Odisha a role model for tsunami preparedness. With this award, the state is motivated to make the 326 villages and urban local bodies tsunami ready in one year's time.

Winners of the AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge

Winners of a challenge envisaged to showcase India as one of the leading app developing countries globally were announced in nine categories that saw short video app Chingari, news app Logically and health app StepSetGo emerge as top players in their categories, among others.
The "AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge" was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2020 which saw participation from 6,940 tech entrepreneurs and start-ups across the country.
The challenge had entries for nine different categories namely Business, eLearning, Entertainment, Games, Health, News, Office and Work from Home, Others and Social. A mega hackathon was organised on Friday where the top finalists selected under the challenge across categories showcased their apps.
In the Social category, Chingari emerged as the top winner, followed by writing app Your Quote and Koo which allows people to follow top Indians and news in Indian languages.
In the Business category, the top three winners were Zoho Invoice, Books & Expense; Mall 91; and GimBooks -- Easy Invoice Manager, respectively. The E-Learning category also had three winners with Disprz; Kutuki Kids Learning app; and Hello English: Learn English, taking the first, second and third positions respectively.
In the News category, Logically was followed by IsEqualTo which offers daily news, quiz and general knowledge for students. In the Entertainment category, the top three winners were CaptionPlus; Meme Chat; and FTC Talent, respectively.
In the Games category, the top three winners were Hitwicket Superstars - 3D cricket Strategy Game; ScarFall-- The Royale Combat; and World Cricket Championship 2a" WCC2, respectively.
The Office category had two winners Zoho Workplace & Cliq followed by SureMDM. The health category also had two winners StepSetGo (SSG) followed by iMumz - week by week pregnancy programme. The Other category had three winners -- MapmyIndia Move - Maps, Navigation and Tracking; Ask Sarkar; myitreturn in top positions respectively.

Aug 07, 2020

DIAT, Pune Wins First Prize in Smart India Hackathon-2020

Pune-based Defence Institute of Advanced Technology (DIAT) won the first prize in the Smart India Hackathon (SIH) 2020, a national-level digital product building competition.
DIAT's team of six members provided a solution titled "DRISHTI" to recognise face, expression and gesture using artificial intelligence (AI).
The team, led by Dr. Sunita Dhavale, won the first prize of Rs. 1 lakh for solving problem statement MS331 in the category of software posed by the Madhya Pradesh government.
DIAT is a deemed university under the ministry's Department of Defence Research and Development.
The SIH-2020 is a 36-hour non-stop digital product building competition for software edition organised jointly by the Ministry of Human Resource Development and All India Council for Technical Education.

Aug 04, 2020

Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Awards 2020

A group of researchers from IIT Kharagpur was conferred the 'Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Awards 2020' for developing a mechanism for generating electricity from wet clothes left under sunlight to dry.
Another team from the institute was separately granted the same award for addressing the problem of energy conservation and thermal management in wearable and flexible electronic devices.
The 'Gandhian Young Technological Innovation (GYTI) Awards' was instituted by the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institution (SRISTI), a voluntary organisation.
The GYTI Award celebrates the spirit of student innovation in all the fields of engineering, science, technology and design through extremely affordable/frugal solution or the ones pushing the technological edge.

Aug 02, 2020

Dipankar Wins Prem Bhatia Award for Journalism

The Indian Express Special Correspondent Dipankar Ghose won the Prem Bhatia Award for political reporting for his work on issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic, including the migrant labour crisis.
While Ghose won the award for the category of reporting on political issues, the award for reporting on environmental and development issues was given to the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), a journalism website dedicated to reporting on rural India.
The Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust, which confers the awards for outstanding journalism, said in a press release that Ghose has been awarded for his coverage of the migrant labour crisis and other Covid-19 related issues.
Apart from reporting on the issue of migrant labour walking back hundreds of kilometres to their home towns during the lockdown, Ghose also reported a series of stories from Bhagalpur in Bihar for over a month starting mid-June to understand the effects of the pandemic and the lockdown in small-town India.

Aug 01, 2020

Ministry of Tribal Affairs Receives SKOCH Gold Award

SKOCH Gold Award was awarded to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) for its "Empowerment of Tribals through IT enabled Scholarship Schemes" project. The project was launched to show Government of India's commitment to realize the dreams of Digital India and bringing transparency as well as ease in the delivery of services. MoTA integrated the 5 Scholarship Schemes with DBT Portal under the guidance of DBT Mission in order to align with the larger vision of 'Digital India'.
The 66th SKOCH 2020 Competition was held with name "INDIA RESPONDS TO COVID THROUGH DIGITAL GOVERNANCE". The Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) participated in the DIGITAL INDIA & E-GOVERNANCE-2020 Competition.

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