Important Fact For Prelims (7th March 2019)

• 07 Mar 2019

Janaushadhi Diwas

• The Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers has decided to celebrate 7^th March 2019 as ‘Janaushadhi Diwas’ across India to provide further impetus & create awareness about use of generic medicines.
• To provide quality healthcare affordable for all, the Government has taken important steps to make affordable and quality generic medicines popular among the people through Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana (PMBJP).
• Apart from providing affordable quality health products, the PMBJP is also providing a good source of self-employment with self-sustainable and regular earnings. E.g.:
  • Average sales per store per month has grown to Rs 1.50 lakhs as per a survey conducted by the Bureau of Pharma PSUs of India (BPPI).

Swachh Survekshan Awards 2019

• New Delhi Municipal Council area was given the ‘Cleanest Small City’ award.
• Uttarakhand’s Gauchar was adjudged the ‘Best Ganga Town’ in the central government survey.
• The ‘Cleanest Big City’ award has been bagged by Ahmedabad.
• Raipur is the ‘Fastest Moving Big City’.
• Ujjain has been the adjudged the ‘Cleanest Medium City’.
• Mathura-Vrindavan bagged the tag of the ‘Fastest Moving Medium Cities’.

Swachh Survekshan awards(Urban)

• The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) started ‘Swachh Survekshan-2016’ survey for the rating of 73 cities in January 2016.
  • It was followed by ‘Swachh Survekshan-2017’ conducted in January ranking 434 cities.
  • Swachh Survekshan 2018 for ranking 4,203 Cities.
• In a bid to scale up the coverage of the ranking exercise and encourage towns and cities to actively implement mission initiatives in a timely and innovative manner, the 2019 survey included all cities, making it the largest such cleanliness survey in the world.
• The Quality Council of India (QCI) has been commissioned the responsibility of carrying out the assessment.
• Top-ranked cities received a statue of Mahatma Gandhi as a memento for their work towards cleanliness.

Google Bolo: Reader-Tutor App

• Google has recently launched a new app called Bolo. It will help students in India read in Hindi and English and work as a tutor of sorts.
• The Bolo app comes after a pilot project that Google ran in Uttar Pradesh with ASER centre.
• The annual ASER 2018 report showed that of all students enrolled in grade 5 in rural India, only about half of them can confidently read a grade 2 level textbook.
  • The Google Bolo app will hope to plug that gap with its tutor-based approach in helping children read.
• The app includes an Assistant called Diya as well, which encourages children with their reading, understanding skills.
• The app relies on Google’s speech recognition and text-to-speech technology and currently limited to two languages, Hindi and English.