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Union Health Minister: 100% Adult Population Has Been Vaccinated With The First Dose In Six States/UTs

Delhi: Union Health Minister, Mansukh Mandaviya, on Sunday, praised six states – Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Lakshadweep and Sikkim for completing the vaccination process (for the first dose at least) of 100 % of their adult population against COVID – 19. According to data from the CoWIN portal, approximately 50, 25,129 vaccination doses were administered till 8 pm on Sunday. The above data reveals that the adult population in the respective six states completed the first shot of the vaccines against COVID – 19. The cumulative jabs given across the country crossed has crossed 74 crores. India’s vaccination campaign started on January 16, 2021, with the healthcare workers getting their first dose of the vaccine. Important timelines: March 1 – The government opened the vaccinations for everyone aged 60 years and above and for people aged 45 years and above with comorbidities. May 1 – The centre opened vaccinations for adults aged 18 years and above. Mansukh Mandaviya tweeted, “Congratulations to these States & UTs for administering the first #COVID19 vaccine dose to 100% of the adult population. Special appreciation for the healthcare workers in these regions for their diligence & commitment.” Source: PTI and India Today

Request initiated by private Management of Private schools to give some relaxation in fee fixation; to the Andhra Pradesh government

The management of the private school in the state of Andhra Pradesh has initiated a request to its government to allow relaxations in the fee fixation rules for the sake of helping the already burdened sectors and for the survival of the budget private schools. Since the school has been facing a shutdown due to covid-9 for the past 18 months, there are a lot of financial crises being faced by these schools lately, due to the covid-19 pandemic. Keeping in mind, the need of the hour as per the current situation of these schools, the President of National Independence school alliance (NISA) Dr. Kulbhushan Sharma, mentioned, “As per the total revenue of the private schools in India has fallen from Rs 15 lakh to 7.5 lakh crores. Among these almost 80 % of schools are low-budget private schools. Lately, they have been under a lot of burdens due to financial stress with EMIs for buses, insurance, loans from financiers, teacher’s salary, ESI, property tax, bill, etc.” Sharma Added,” the fee fixation rules in Andhra Pradesh have become more troublesome while there was a shutdown of schools seen due to covid-19. The autonomy of private sectors has been violated in many areas. Hence, it has become important now that some relaxation in fee fixation rules shall be given by the Andhra Pradesh government. That will help these private schools to catch up with the losses incurred during the pandemic. Source: ndtv.com

Indian OTT platforms are facing monetization issues

The Over-the-top video streaming platforms in India; Disney+Hotstar, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Voot, and many more, might seem to have been making deeper roots in the country but are still very far from making profitable numbers in their account. This is due to the streaming firms being trapped with high content costs, low Arpus (Average revenue cost per user), an uncrowded market with an end number of options, the availability of free-of-cost ad-based platforms, and the challenges of piracy. Other than just creating web originals these big platforms of OTT are also acquiring digital rights for various films, and video streaming services. For this the OTT platforms are being expected to spend Rupees 1,920 crore. But as a matter of concern, as per a report by media consulting firm Ormax, 110.5 million out of 353.2 million only watch paid content on OTT. Source: livemint.com

IIT Guwahati retains its position at #7 in the NIRF Rankings 2021 by Education Ministry

GUWAHATI, 9th September 2021: Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati has retained its position in National Institutional Rankings Framework (NIRF) achieving 07 Rank in ‘Engineering’ Category this year and ranked 08 in India in ‘Overall’ Category in NIRF 2021. Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, Hon’ble Education Minister, Government of India, announced NIRF 2021 results today (9th September 2021). Announcing the NIRF 2021 Ranking Results, Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, Hon’ble Education Minister, Government of India, said, “In India especially the public Institutions should come out with their own ranking framework as the state fully supports the Institutes. The entire eco system is primarily qualitive in India but we are little hesitant in nature, In India we never consider education as a commodity but in western world it is slightly commercialized. The ranking practice around the globe was a surprise to me, the quality of research work, the quality of knowledge power in our institutions was a pleasant surprise to me” Congratulating the Institute on its performance, Prof. T. G. Sitharam, Director, IIT Guwahati, said, “This is a reflection of the dedicated effort by the institute faculty, staff and students despite the pandemic. This is clearly reflected in both overall and engineering ranks over the past several years and seen in international rankings as well.” Highlighting the Academic and Research plans for the coming year, Prof. T. G. Sitharam said, “The Institute has been working in multiple fronts of academic and industry to attract the best brains across the world and industry leaders, who have been given appointments as honorary and visiting faculty members and this has intensified both the academic collaboration and industry interaction, thereby allowing more technology transfers and better publications. This has also resulted in attracting higher research funds, opening newer academic interdisciplinary schools and centers and engaging more closely with government organizations for socially relevant projects as well as implementing the NEP2020.” IIT Guwahati is the only academic institution in India that occupied a place among the top 100 world universities – under 50 years of age – ranked by the London-based Times Higher Education (THE) in the year 2014 and continues to maintain its superior position even today in various International Rankings. IIT Guwahati has eleven departments, five inter-disciplinary academic centres and four schools covering all the major engineering, science and humanities disciplines, offering BTech, BDes, MA, MDes, MTech, MSc/MS and PhD programmes. The institute offers a residential campus to 412 faculty members and more than 6,000 students at present. IIT Guwahati gained rank 41 globally in the ‘Research Citations per Faculty’ category and overall 395 rank in the QS World University Rankings 2022 released recently. Among other frontier areas of research and innovation, IIT Guwahati is working towards augmenting critical science research initiatives in Genomics, Developmental Biology, Health Care and Bioinformatics, Flexible Electronics, Advanced Functional Materials, Sustainable Polymers, Rural Technologies, Disaster Resilience and Risk Reduction, and Water Resources and Management. Started in 2015, NIRF outlines a methodology to rank educational institutions across the country. The parameters used for ranking broadly cover “Teaching, Learning and Resources,” “Research and Professional Practices,” “Graduation Outcome,” “Outreach and Inclusivity,” and “Perception.” ABOUT IIT GUWAHATI Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati established in 1994 has completed 25 years of glorious existence in 2019. At present, the Institute has eleven departments, five inter-disciplinary academic centres and four schools covering all the major engineering, science and humanities disciplines, offering BTech, BDes, MA, MDes, MTech, MSc and PhD programmes. The institute offers a residential campus to 412 faculty members and more than 6,000 students at present. Besides its laurels in teaching and research, IIT Guwahati has been able to fulfil the aspirations of people of the North East region to a great extent since its inception in 1994. The picturesque campus is on a sprawling 285 hectares plot on the north bank of the Brahmaputra, around 20 kms from the heart of the Guwahati city. IIT Guwahati is the only academic institution in India that occupied a place among the top 100 world universities – under 50 years of age – ranked by the London-based Times Higher Education (THE) in the year 2014 and continues to maintain its superior position even today in various International Rankings. IIT Guwahati gained rank 41 globally in the ‘Research Citations per Faculty’ category and overall 395 rank in the QS World University Rankings 2022 released recently. IIT Guwahati has retained the 7th position among the best engineering institutions of the country in the ‘India Rankings 2019’ declared by National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Union ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD). IIT Guwahati has been also ranked 2nd in the ‘Swachhata Ranking’ conducted by the Govt. of India. Recently, IIT Guwahati has been ranked as the top ranked University in 2019 for IT developers by HackerRank in the Asia-Pacific region. Among other frontier areas of research and innovation, IIT Guwahati is working towards augmenting critical science research initiatives in Genomics, Developmental Biology, Health Care and Bioinformatics, Flexible Electronics, Advanced Functional Materials, Sustainable Polymers, Rural Technologies, Disaster Resilience and Risk Reduction, and Water Resources and Management. In its silver jubilee year, IIT Guwahati is poised to scale newer heights through all round growth and development.

Netflix is all set to expand into video games and looking forward to hiring new employees

Video games have always been one of the favourite time pass or entertainment for a lot of youngsters across the globe. It does have an addictive impact on the minds of the person playing it, providing a deep sense of satisfaction and joy. Hence video games have so far never been out of fashion. Becoming the cherry on the cake, the pandemic era brought back the craze and allowed contribution of enough time for people to play and enjoy these games. Keeping the steep rise of demand in mind and the quality freak content, Netflix is all set to launch newest video games and targeting new hiring for the same. With this aim OTT platform Netflix is expanding into video games, for this purpose the company has hired Mike Verdu, who is a former Facebook and Electronic Arts executive, as its new vice president of game development. As per the reports, Verdu was previously the VP of content for Facebook Reality Labs, where he was in charge to look after Oculus Studios and the teams that brought second and third-party virtual reality games to Oculus VR headsets. At present Netflix Verdu will be reporting to Greg Peters, Netflix’s chief operating officer and chief product officer. This is being considered as the trump card move by Netflix, keeping in the mind the latest, market trends. The Liontree CEO Aryeh Bourkoff, who is also the banker behind the biggest media deals of 2021, which included WarnerMedia- Discovery merger and MGM’s sale to Amazon, has signalled this attempt to be made by Netflix soon in coming time, during a panel at the Tribeca X conference last month. It was determined in the panel that various big companies are now approaching towards offering as many products as it can. Be it Spotify offering video with Audio or Netflix offering audio, video as well as gaming products and Amazon offering content on OTT as well almost every sellable product under the sun. If these companies would have stayed limited to doing what they started off, there was no certainty of its survival on such large scale in the present scenario. Along with this Netflix has also waved the flags signalling its move towards podcast content as well in the coming time soon, for which the new hire of N’ Jeri Eaton is on the list. Source: The economictiomes.com

A Bharat EdTech initiative is being launched by GiveIndia and Sattva collaboration

In this new time when everything has gone online, the new trends of education are also grooming themselves to be fully online and hi-tech to be suited with the current need of education. As kids are now bound to stay at home ever since it’s been more than a year. Since every problem comes up with a solution it is impeding to understand that new Edu-Tech collaborations are going to be a favorite affair for students and education. Keeping the aspirational ideas of increased demand for EdTech, a lot of ventures are trying their best to create a benchmark in the market. Juxtaposing the same aspirations in the right direction, Bengaluru -based GiveIndia, has launched a new EdTech initiative, with a target to enable online access to education for over 1 million underprivileged school -going children across the country. This a new aspirational project under the banner of Bharat EdTech Initiative, is been inspired and initiated to clear up the digital divide between the demographic gap of students who belonged to two different categories of low-income community and wealth community. So that the loss incurred during the covid-19 can be made up to these children which created a setback during the pandemic due to lack of suitable support and infrastructure. There are several EdTech community partners involved in this initiative; EI-Mindspark, Topper, Vedantu, Akansha, Bal Utsav, Educate Girls, People for Action, Saajha and Sarathion board. This program is especially designed for school goers and children belonging to classes 3 to 12, with families belonging to income group 25000 or less. This initiative will bridge the gap between under-privileged and new technologies. With this it will provide an equal access to the latest type of education, for the vulnerable class and girls. This program will cover several languages, Mathematics and science subjects and it will be implemented in two phases. The first phase is targeted to improve engagement for leaning from home-based learning culture till August 2022. This will focus on serving children from key geographical areas for at least 10,000 students. Second phase which is to be started from September 2022 onwards, will be targeted to increase these improvised applied solutions across the country and cover more than 1 million students. In this initiative, GiveIndia is set to manage partner relationships and fund administration, while Sattva will be the design manager and the program partner. Along with that Dell foundation is the anchor founder and fund initiator for this project. It will be a ray of hope project for many underprivileged children and will also lessen the internet divide as far as possible. Which the biggest need of the time, when being connected online is the only best way possible. Source: Theeconomicstimes.com

Fake medicines for cancer patients seized: 3 Arrested for the same

A consignment of spurious medicines which was for the cancer patient treatment, was seized from three people in total at Southeast Delhi Jasola Vihar. As per sources it is yet to be confirmed whether the medicines were produced in the foreign country or not. Police said information was received that three people who were allegedly selling fake medicines to the cancer patients at a very high cost. To catch the trio of this fake medicine selling gang a trap was laid by police in Jasola Vihar. As the gang was not carrying any document or, medicine slip for the medication they carried and they had no answer for such reasons, as per the police. In this course police seized 73 packets of drugs; labelled as Palbocent and Lenvaxin- medications used for treating cancer. Along with those other fake medicines labelled as Osicent, Crizocent and Ibrucent were also seized from the fake medicine selling gang. Later the medicines were checked by the drug officer who declared its quality as doubtful. Source: Healthworld.com

NIRF Ranking 2021: Bringing IIT-Madras and IISc-Bangalore to top positions

When it comes to ranking the universities on the basis of their categorisation, not much has changed for the engineering schools and universities category so far, in respect to the NIRF Ranking. Yet this year no new institution or university was able to replace IISc, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and Banaras Hindu University (BHU) from being in the top three in the university ranking list. On the other hand; IIT Madras, IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi continue to be to ruler of engineering category NIRF Ranking table. As per the report released by NIRF ranking, IIT-Madras, IISc-Bangalore and IIT-Bombay have come to be the top three institutions in the sixth edition of the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) which was lately announced any the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Thursday. Along with JNU, universities like: Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) and Hyderabad Central University (HCU), which have lately been at the centre of student protests against the union government, also made it to the top 10 universities in the country. Although JMI has improved its ranking from tenth position to sixth rank this year, HCU slipped from rank sixth to nine. Source: Theindianexpress.com

Dehradun: District Magistrate Travels in City Bus To Take Stock Of Arrangement in the Smart City Bus Service

Dehradun, Uttarakhand: Dehradun District Magistrate R Rajesh Kumar took stock of various bus service related arrangements while riding in a Smart City Limited bus from ISBT to Tehsil Chowk. During the ride, he interacted with the public and received suggestions from them to improve the bus service and related arrangements. He instructed for an online ticket payment system using QR code and to make the announcement system more effective. Kumar instructed the officers of Smart City Limited to arrange better first aid and masks so that people without masks could use them. He instructed to ensure adherence to COVID protocols in the bus. He said that various public service schemes by the government should be communicated on screens on smart city buses. He also directed to reserve some seats for women, specially-abled and senior citizens in the bus. The District Magistrate sought suggestions from the passengers to make the bus services better. He was suggested to start bus services in other routes in the district. He also saw the traffic signals installed by the Smart City at ISBT and Smart CCTV cameras installed for traffic control/security, which are being controlled from the Smart City Control Room located at IT Park. He asked to make the electric buses run by Smart City double-decker and prepare an action plan to provide more smooth traffic to the commuters. In view of the heavy vehicular traffic at ISBT, he asked to strengthen the traffic signals further so that the pedestrians are not inconvenienced in any way. Source: The article has been published by ANI.

NIRF Rankings 2021: IIT Madras and IISc Among The Top Colleges On the List

National Institute of Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings for the year 2021 were released at 12 noon today i.e. 9th September 2021 by a webcast by the Union Education Minister Dharmendra Singh. Among the list, IIT Madras ranks as the topmost college in the overall category. Next in the list is IISc Bangalore accompanied by IIT Bombay at the third position. Viewers can look through the complete list from the website of NIRF, ‘nirfindia.org’ Miranda House has pursued its title again for this year by topping the list under the best college category. Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi and Loyola College of Chennai hold the second and third rank respectively. The institutes are given scores based on – teaching, learning and resources (TLR), research and professional practice (RP), graduation outcomes (GO), outreach and inclusivity (OI), peer perception. Last year, the NIRF rankings were released in online format owing to the pandemic. IIT Madras was adjudged the top institute of India 2020 (overall category) while the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore was the top university followed by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Source: The article has been published by the Indian Express with a few edits from the ArdorComm News Network Team.