1. Country’s largest power producer, NTPC Ltd has been conferred “Excellence” in the prestigious CII-ITC Sustainability Awards 2020 in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Domain at the 15th CII-ITC Sustainability Awards 2020 held through the virtual platform.
2. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had released a book called ‘Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Parliament: A Commemorative Volume’, to mark the 96th birth anniversary of the former prime minister.
3. The Ministry of Environment Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) along with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) India has come up with a unique initiative — a “firefly bird diverter” for overhead power lines in areas where Great Indian Bustard (GIB) populations are found in the wild.
4. Government of Telangana signed an MoU with SAP India to digitize and empower MSMEs in the state by equipping them with digital skilling and technologies.
5. Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi will inaugurate India’s first-ever driverless train operations on Delhi Metro’s Magenta Line (Janakpuri West – Botanical Garden) along with the fully operational National Common Mobility Card service on the Airport Express Line on 28th December 2020 at 11 AM via video conferencing.
6. India, which appears to have been pushed back to being the world’s sixth biggest economy in 2020, will again overtake the UK to become the fifth largest in 2025 and race to the third spot by 2030, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said in an annual report. India had overtaken the UK in 2019 to become the fifth largest economy in the world but has been relegated to 6th spot in 2020. The CEBR forecasts that the Indian economy will expand by 9 per cent in 2021 and by 7 per cent in 2022.
7. The Directorate General of Training (DGT), under the ministry of skills development and entrepreneurship, has joined hands with Microsoft and NASSCOM Foundation to provide digital learning content for students at industrial training institutes (ITIs). Nearly 1, 20,000 students in around 3000 ITIs across India can be benefited by this digitized e-learning module via the Bharatskill’s portal.
8. The Assam cabinet approved the Assam Official Language Amendment Bill for making Bodo (in Devanagari script) an associate official language of the state.