Vineet Joshi Panel
The Center recently constituted a panel, headed by Higher Education Secretary Vineet Joshi, to suggest measures to reduce dependency of students on coaching centres and assess the
effectiveness and fairness of competitive entrance examinations.
It is a nine-member panel constituted by the Union Education Ministry
The objective of the panel is to suggest measures to reduce the dependency of students on
coaching centres and assess the effectiveness and fairness of competitive entrance
examinations.
The panel will also brainstorm on the gaps in the current schooling system that contribute to
students’ reliance on coaching centres, particularly the limited focus on critical thinking, logical
reasoning, analytical skills, and innovation, and “the prevalence of rote learning practices”.
Apart from Mr. Joshi, Chairman of the CBSE, Joint Secretary (Institutions), Department of School Education and Literacy, representatives of IIT Madras, NIT Trichy, IIT Kanpur, and the NCERT, and three school principals (one each from Kendriya Vidyalaya, Navodaya Vidyalaya, and a Private School—to be nominated by the Centre) will be members in the panel.
NAKSHATRA
Recently, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has introduced its first high-performance computing facility NAKSHATRA at its National Institute of Virology (NIV) facility in Pune.
It is the state-of-the-art high performance computing (HPC) cluster for virological research.
The NAKSHATRA cluster includes 12 compute nodes, 700 cores, and a total storage capacity of 1 petabyte.
It will support advanced bioinformatics workflows such as next-generation sequencing (NGS), transcriptomics, metagenomics, phylogenetics, and structural bioinformatics.
It enables enhanced storage and optimises the pipeline for genomic research, which ensures
better viral genomic surveillance capacity and national preparedness for any future pandemic.
It is developed under the Pradhan Mantri Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission
(PMABHIM), the facility forms the cornerstone of a new project, called the High Performance
Computing Next Generation Sequencing Hub.
Bhashini Platform
BHASHINI, or the BHASHa INterface for India, is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered language translation platform developed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under its National Language Translation Mission.
It aims to build a National Public Digital Platform for languages to develop services and products for citizens by leveraging the power of AI and other emerging technologies.
It aims to help people translate content into various Indian languages.
BHASHINI also aims to increase the content in Indian languages on the Internet substantially in the domains of public interest, particularly governance and policy, science & technology, etc., thus encouraging citizens to use the Internet in their own language
