Daily Quiz: UPSC Prelims Marathon – March 19, 2020

The Mission, launched in 2015, envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities. The mission would be implemented jointly by Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) through two organizations the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.

National IPR Policy 2016

• It aims to promote a holistic and conducive ecosystem to catalyse the full potential of intellectual property for India’s economic growth and socio-cultural development, while protecting public interest.
• The rationale for the National IPR Policy lies in the need to create awareness about the importance of IPRs as a marketable financial asset and economic tool.
• Department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP) is the nodal agency for all IPR issues and the policy will be renewed every five years in consultation with all the stakeholders.
• The policy will also suggest incentives such as tax benefits and fee waivers to encourage R&D and IP creation to strengthen the Make In India/Start-up/Digital India initiatives.
• To protect ‘small inventions’ developed especially in the informal / unorganised sectors, policy will promote ‘utility patents’ (with lower compliance burden and shorter period of protection, when compared to the normal patents) only for mechanical innovations.

UNNATI, a capacity building programme on Nanosatellite development, is an initiative by ISRO to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first United Nations conference on the exploration and peaceful uses of outer space (UNISPACE-50). The programme provides opportunities to the participating developing countries to strengthen in assembling, integrating and testing of Nanosatellite. UNNATI programme is planned to be conducted for 3 years by U.R. Rao Satellite Centre of ISRO in 3 batches and will target to benefit officials of 45 countries. The first batch started today in which 30 delegates from 17 countries are participating.

“APSARA” – the celestial water nymph, by Pandit Nehru himself. The basic design for this reactor was frozen in July 1955 and Indian scientists and engineers completed the construction in just over a year. With APSARA, India became the first Asian country outside the erstwhile Soviet Union, to have designed and built its own nuclear reactor. The next crucial step involved the planning of larger reactors having much higher neutron flux and power than what was available at APSARA. This plan materialized in 1960 with the building of CIRUS, a high power (40 MWt) research reactor. This reactor, then known as the Canada India Reactor or CIR for short, was built in collaboration with Canada. In early 1961, a zero energy critical facility named ZERLINA (Zero Energy Reactor for Lattice Investigations and New Assemblies) was built, for studying various geometrical aspects (lattice parameters) of a reactor fuelled with natural uranium and moderated with heavy water.

The Indian ballistic missile defence program aims to develop multi layered ballistic missile defence system for protecting the Indian territory from ballistic missile attacks. The advancements in Technology has allowed various countries to develop anti ballistic missiles for destroying the incoming ballistic missiles before they hit the ground. India has faced the threat of ballistic missile attacks since the early 90s from China and Pakistan. The increase in tensions with Pakistan after the deployment of M-11 missiles by Pakistan forced India to think about development anti ballistic missile defence system. After the nuclear test of India conducted in May 1998, Pakistan also tested nuclear weapons due to which the threat of nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems intensified. The Kargil War of 1999 between India and Pakistan further increased this tension.

India began the development of anti ballistic missile system in late 1999 in light of Pakistan eschewing of a nuclear no first use policy. The development of ballistic missile defence system accelerated after USA vetoed India’s attempt to acquire Israeli Arrow-2 interceptor missile in 2002. The ballistic missile defence system consist of two land and sea based interceptor missiles, viz. The Prithvi Air Defence for high altitude interception and the Advanced Air Defence for lower altitude interception.