• World Homeopathy Day is celebrated on April 10^th every year, to honour the birth anniversary of Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy and a German physician.
• The focus of World Homeopathy Day 2023 is centered around the theme ‘One Health, One Family’. The primary objective of this theme is to advocate for evidence-based homeopathic treatment for the well-being of every family member through the involvement of family physicians within the community.
• Principle- Likes can heal likes, according to homoeopathy’s “similia similibus curantur”.
  • It is a notion that a disease can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people.

• Recently, Volume 1 of Environment statistics 2023 was released by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI).
• Key findings
  • In 2022, annual rainfall measured in India has increased in comparison to 2021.
  • In 2022, maximum heatwave days were reported in Rajasthan, followed by Punjab and Haryana, Jharkhand, and Delhi.
    • Notably, Assam and Himachal Pradesh have not reported a heatwave day since 2010.
  • Number of cyclonic storms experienced by North Indian Ocean (NIO) increased substantially in 2018 which persisted in subsequent year but again reduced in 2022.

• The 13th edition of the Olive Crown Awards was held in Mumbai, India, to commend individuals and corporates that promoted sustainability or ‘green advertising’.
• This award is awarded by the International Advertising Association.
• The awards featured 17 categories, including ‘Green Agency of the Year’ and ‘Green Campaign of the Year’.
• Notable winners included
  • N. Mohan– ‘Green Crusader of the Year award for his commitment to restoring seven lakes near Chennai.
  • Kirloskar Limitless received the gold award in the ‘Corporate Crusader of the Year’ category for their work on ‘A Minute for Nature’.
  • Chirag Rural Development Foundation and People for Animals Wildlife Rescue and Conservation Centre were awarded the gold prize in the ‘Green NGO of the Year’ category.

• NASA’s high-resolution air pollution monitoring instrument TEMPO lifted atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
• TEMPO will allow scientists to monitor air pollutants and their emission sources and air quality across greater North America on an hourly basis during daytime.
• Situated in geostationary orbit 35,786 kilometers above the equator.
• Among the pollutants tracked by TEMPO will be nitrogen dioxide, produced from the combustion of fossil fuels, formaldehyde and ozone.
• It will be able to measure atmospheric pollution down to a spatial resolution of 10 square kilometers or neighborhood level.

• The Sports Authority of India has integrated Khelo India Games Certificates with Digilocker.
• Khelo India Games certificate is a document that is awarded to athletes who participate in the Khelo India Games.
• The certificate recognizes the participation of the athlete in the games and serves as proof of their achievement.

About

This will allow athletes, support staff, technical officers and competition managers to access their certificates digitally. It would also provide for real time verification of Certificates.

About Sports Authority of India (SAI)

• Sports Authority of India (SAI) was set up in 1982 as a Society registered under Societies Act, 1860.
• SAl has been entrusted with the twin objectives of promoting sports and achieving sporting excellence at the national and international level.
• SAI has played a significant role in shaping India’s sports development by providing training to elite athletes and at the same time operating a number of schemes for the identification and development of young talent.

About Digilocker

• DigiLocker is a flagship initiative of the Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY) under Digital India programme.
• DigiLocker aims at ‘Digital Empowerment’ of citizens by providing access to authentic digital documents to citizen’s digital document wallet.

DigiLocker is a secure cloud-based platform for storage, sharing and verification of documents & certificates.

• Conference on Accelerating Rail Digital Transformation in Asia and Pacific region was organized by

ESCAP, an intergovernmental platform, in collaboration with Ministry of Railways.

About UN-ESCAP

• United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific (ESCAP) has headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand.
• It supports inclusive and sustainable development in region by generating action-oriented knowledge, and by providing technical assistance and capacity-building services in support of national development objectives, regional agreements.
• It was first established by Economic and Social Council in 1947 as United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and Far East (ECAFE).
  • Renamed in 1974 as ESCAP.
• Membership: 53 member States and 9 associate members.

• About 10,000 genomes are expected to be completely sequenced by the end of the year 2023 under the Genome India Project.
• Under GIP, Department of Biotechnology (DBT) is close to have sequenced 7,000 genomes and 3,000 of these are already available for public access.
  • United Kingdom, China, and United States are among the countries that have programmes to sequence at least 1 lakh of their genomes.

About GIP

• DBT initiated GIP in 2020 (inspired from Human Genome Project) to sequence 10,000 Indian human genomes and create a database.
• Creating a database of Indian genomes means that researchers from anywhere can learn about genetic variants that are unique to India’s population groups and use that to customise drugs and therapies.
• GIP is led by Centre for Brain Research at Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science, which acts as central coordinator between a collaboration of 20 leading institutions.
• Genome sequencing is figuring out the order of DNA nucleotides, or bases, in a genome—the order of Adenine, Cytosine, Guanines, and Thymine that make up an organism’s DNA.
  • Genome is the complete set of genetic information in an organism.
• Applications of Genome sequencing: Identifying inherited disorders and mutations that drive cancer progression, and tracking disease outbreak; Personalised medicines based on genomic make up etc

• President of India inaugurates Gaj Utsav at Kaziranga National Park in Assam to mark 30th anniversary of Project Elephant (PE).
• Project Elephant was launched by Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) in 1992 as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme.
• Objective: To protect elephants, their habitat & corridors; address issues of man-animal conflict; and Welfare of captive elephant.
• MoEF&CC provides financial and technical support to major elephant range states in country through Project Elephant.

About Asian Elephant (Elephas Maximas Indicus)

• Found in central and southern Western Ghats, North East India, eastern India and northern India and in some parts of southern peninsular India.
• The Asian elephant is the largest land mammal on the Asian continent.
• Highly intelligent with strong family bonds;
• They have longest gestation period of all mammals (18 to 22 months);
• As per Elephant Census, 2017, Karnataka has highest number of elephants, followed by Assam and Kerala.
• Protection status
  • IUCN- endangered
  • Appendix I of CITES
  • Included in Schedule I and IV of WPA 1972

Other info

• Recently Terai Elephant Reserve in Utter Pradesh became 33rd India’s ER.

• Under the ‘Mera Gaon Meri Dharohar‘ (My Village My Heritage) programme of the National Mission for Cultural Mapping, the government has identified and documented distinctive features of more than one lakh villages across the country, in a bid to harness the unique cultural heritage of rural India.
• In cultural asset mapping, villages have been broadly divided into seven-eight categories based on whether they are important ecologically, developmentally and scholastically, and if they are connected to some historical or mythological events.
  • Ecological category includes Bishnoi village (for living in harmony with nature) near Jodhpur, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand’s Raini village (Chipko movement).
  • Developmental category includes Modhera in Gujarat (first solar-powered village in India).
  • Historical category includes Kandel in Madhya Pradesh (famous Jal Satyagraha site), Suketi in Himachal Pradesh (Asia’s oldest fossil park), Pandrethan in Kashmir( the village of Shaivite mystic Lal Ded) and villages of Hanoli Uttarakhand and Vidurashwathar of Karnataka are linked to Mahabharata.

About NMCM

• NMCM was launched by Ministry of Culture (MoC) in 2017 and handed over to Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) in 2021.
• It aims to develop a comprehensive database of art forms, artists and other resources across the country.
• Objective–
  • Preserve rich cultural heritage of country for future generations.
  • Create a strong “Cultural Vibrancy” throughout the nation.
  • Convert vast and widespread cultural canvass of India into an objective Cultural Mapping.
• MoC has partnered with Common Services Centres, under Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY) to conduct NMCM.

• President Droupadi Murmu had awarded Padma Shri to Nek Ram Sharma, a farmer of Nanj village in Karsog subdivision of Mandi district, in Delhi.
• He has been conferred the award for reviving the traditional crop system of nine foodgrains.
• Sharma started an Angora farm in 1990, which continued till 1995.
• He then switched to organic farming to revive the traditional crop system of nine foodgrains.
• By 2000, he made good progress and developed finger millet, foxtail millet, barn yard, proso millet, kodo millet, buck beat, sorghum and pearl millet.
  • These traditional foodgrains were on the verge of extinction.
• These nine foodgrains are known as Nau Anaj, which is a natural inter-cropping method in which these are grown on the same piece of land without using any chemical, cutting down water usage by 50 per cent and raising land fertility.