Country's highest Meteorological Centre started at Leh

Union Health Ministry has said that the dry run for COVID-19 Vaccination has been successfully conducted in four states of Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Gujarat.The two-day end-to-end dry run was undertaken in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, Rajkot and Gandhinagar in Gujarat, Ludhiana and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar in Punjab and Sonitpur and Nalbari districts of Assam. The exercise is aimed at identifying challenges and making required changes in the plan so that the final process becomes foolproof. The Ministry said specific teams were formed for various tasks by the district administration and activities like uploading of dummy beneficiary’s data, vaccine allocation, communication vaccination details to vaccinators and beneficiaries, and beneficiary mobilization were carried out. The objective of the dry run was also to undertake and confirm field implementation of IT platform Co-WIN and guide way forward prior to actual implementation. Detailed insights and feedback will help enrich the operational guidelines and IT platform and will strengthen the Covid-19 vaccination roll out plan.

-Union Minister of Earth Sciences, Dr Harsh Vardhan, virtually inaugurated India's highest Meteorological Centre in Leh, on Tuesday. After Itanagar Centre in Arunachal Pradesh, Leh Met centre at 3500 meters highest from mean sea level is the highest in the Himalayan region. AIR correspondent reports that with four Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) a Meteorological Department centre for Ladakh region started working from today. Despite Covid pandemic, within Nine months of time the new centre is established to cater the arid cold desert and geo politically all important Ladakh weather requirements.Speaking on the occasion, Minister Dr Harshavardhan said, Ladakh Met Centre is one of the commitments fulfilled by the Union Government for the welfare of new Union Territory Ladakh. The new Centre will provide Ladakh specific weather forecasts more accurately and consistently for the region.Ladakh Lieutenant Governor RK Mathur appealed Dr. Harsh Vardhan for Ladakh specific Weather App, Data integration of large number of micro climatic conditions of Ladakh and Display boards at entry points into Ladakh region to make the public and tourists aware of weather conditions and prepare.

-Government has assured that vaccines will work against the new variants of the corona virus and there is no evidence that current vaccines will fail to protect against the new variants reported from the UK and South Africa. Briefing media in New Delhi , Principal Scientific Advisor K. Vijay Raghavan said that the changes in the variants of corona virus are not sufficient to make the vaccines ineffective. He said, most vaccines target the spike protein and stimulate our immune system to produce a wide range of protective antibodies. Giving the details about the new variants, Mr. Raghavan said, 17 important changes have been seen in the new variants and it increases the spread of transmission. He added that the UK variant is more transmissible and it increases the positivity rate. He however, clarified that these new variants do not increase the severity of the disease.

-Gujarat Government on Tuesday announced its new Solar Power Policy - 2021. As per the policy, any person, developer or industry can set up a solar project in its premises or land without any limit.  A limit of only 50 per cent of sanctioned load/contract demand for industry to set up the solar project has been removed in the new policy. Addressing the press conferance in Gandhinagar,  Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani said that this policy will bring down power cost to industry from Rs. 8 per unit to around Rs. 4.50. It will reduce the production cost, which will help the state manufacturers to be globally competitive. According to the policy, the power consumers will be able to set up solar projects on their rooftop or vacant place. They can also offer their space to third party for power generation and utilization. Security deposit given to power companies has been cut from Rs. 25 lakh per MW to Rs. 5 lakh per MW. New solar power policy will remain effective for the next five years. 

-The Income Tax Department has carried out search and seizure action on a number of hawala operators engaged in the activity of routing and handling unaccounted cash in Delhi region. The search action has resulted in unearthing of incriminating evidences revealing various shell entities being used for raising bogus purchase, sale bills and routing of unaccounted funds through several layers of bank accounts.In a statement, Central Board of Direct Taxes, CBDT said, such shell entities are closed after two months, and new ones are formed. It said, incriminating documents evidencing suppression of sales and bogus purchases in excess of 300 crore rupees are detected. The search action has resulted in seizure of unaccounted cash of 14 crore rupees and Bullion worth two crore rupees.