UTTARAKHAND
Dehradun RTO plans to digitise 12 lakh files
The regional transport office (RTO) of Dehradun is planning to initiate a mega project to digitise all the data of the paper documents stored in its premises. The RTO presently has about 12 lakh files stored in various rooms of its building and as per the officials, the digitisation would make the data more accessible to the users and officials concerned besides making more space available in the office building. According to the assistant regional transport officer (ARTO), Dwarika Prasad, there are about 12 lakhs files of paper documents in the regional transport office which sometimes poses challenges in storing and retrieving these documents. The digitisation would make it easy to access the document of a particular file and would also help in making the RTO paper-free, asserted Prasad.
He further informed that after a meeting with senior officials of the transport department next week, the RTO will plan the digitisation project. Moreover, the officials also informed that RTO has started an auto-approval facility for the drivers of the commercial vehicles with up to 10 seats through online mode for the forthcoming Char Dham Yatra as a part of digital services in the transport office.
The transport office of Dehradun was set up in the year 1964 and files related to the vehicles, licenses, transport permits, fitness of vehicles are stored in it. Most of these files are stored in a big hall situated at the centre of the RTO building which is located on the Rajpur road. Hundreds of iron racks are placed in this huge store room in which these files stockpiled. Due to the space constraint in the store room many of these racks are placed in the galleries and other rooms of the office.
INTERNATIONAL
Highlights of Food Waste Index Report
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released the “Food Waste Index Report 2021”. According to the UNEP report, an estimated 931 million tons of food was wasted worldwide in 2019. The agency also emphasized that this amount of wasted food may cause the earth to orbit the earth 7 times. Highlights:
The index report is published by UNEP in cooperation with partner organization WRAP. Of the total waste generation, households accounted for 61% of waste, food services accounted for 26% of foo waste, and retail accounted for 13%.
The report also emphasized that 17% of total global food production was wasted. According to the agency, the weight is approximately equal to 23 million full-loaded 40-ton trucks, enough to make the earth circle seven times.
The annual per capita possession is 91,646,213 tons. According to the report, every country that measures food waste basically has nothing to do with income levels.
Food waste in India: The average household waste in India is 50 kilograms per person per year, which is equivalent to 68,760,163 tons per year. On the other hand, household food waste in the United States is 59 kilograms per capita per year, which is equivalent to 19,359,951 tons per year. The report emphasizes that in China, household waste is 64 kilograms per person per year and 91,646,213 tons per year
NATIONAL
Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu & Uttar Pradesh top states in employability: Skills report
Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh remained the top three states with the highest employable talent, according to the India Skills Report 2021. Karnataka takes the fourth spot followed by Andhra Pradesh. Bangalore is among the most preferred cities to work for aspiring professionals, the report said.
Rajasthan and West Bengal come in the top 10 states with employable talent, yet remain below Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Telangana and Gujarat respectively. Haryana could not make it to this list again, despite the massive push from numerous skill development measures.
The report, prepared by Wheebox in partnership with Taggd, CII, AICTE, AIU and UNDP, showed that 46% of the youth were considered highly employable resources. This is far less than the previous years, indicating a skill gap in education, it said, adding that this is still an encouraging statistic considering that the average age of India is 26.8 years old.
More women were found employable than men. In fact, the number of women enrolled in colleges and degree programs have increased over the past, the report said. The report is based on the assessment of 65,000 candidates.
Earliest cotton in Arabia came from India: Study
For about 600 years, Mleiha was the political centre of southeast Arabia before it was abandoned in the 3rd century CE. And for decades, the emergence of the tropical cotton plant in the arid Arabian peninsula has been a question archaeologists have tried to answer. Oman, they had concluded, was the source of the ancient Arab cotton trade. But now, scientists from the Museum of Natural History in Paris have found evidence in Mleiha that the earliest cotton in the Arab region came from northwest India.
The irony, however, is that a fire which ravaged one of its most important buildings of Mleiha is also what preserved it for posterity. Within this Unesco World Heritage Site in the United Arab Emirates lies a tableaux frozen in fire. It’s a mud brick building with 15 rooms around a central courtyard with signs of a life hastily abandoned in forgotten objects and prized possessions carelessly thrown around, and, the evidence of an ancient Indian trade route, cotton — specifically, 31 whole seeds, 79 fragments and 7 raw fibre clusters.
Municipal Performance Index by Union Ministry
Municipal Performance Index 2020 has been released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) Highlights:
The 2020 Municipal Performance Index (MPI): MPI reviewed the sectoral performance of 111 cities in five verticals (Delhi was evaluated by NDMC and three municipal companies).
These verticals consist of 20 industries and a total of 100 indicators. The five vertical areas under MPI are service, finance, policy, technology and governance.
City ranking:
According to the assessment framework of MPI 2020, cities are classified according to their populations of “million+” (cities with a population of more than one million) and “population of less than one million”.
In the “Millionaire” category: Indore has become the highest-ranked municipality, followed by Surat and Bhopal. In the “less than a million” category: The New Delhi Municipal Council has become the leader, followed by Tirupati and Gandhinagar.