PSCBulletin Answers Club

The NPR would be a register of usual residents of the country. The NPR will be a comprehensive identity database that would help in better targeting of the benefits and services under the government schemes/programmes, improve planning and help strengthen security of the country. This is being done for the first time in the country.

The 15th national census exercise, the biggest census ever to be attempted in human history to cover India’s 1.2 billion population, began on April 1, 2010 with President Pratibha Patil being the first to be enumerated in the decennial exercise.
The census is the most credible source of information on demography (population characteristics), economic activity, literacy and education, housing and household amenities, urbanisation, fertility and mortality, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, language, religion, migration, disability and many other socio-cultural and demographic data since 1872.

Japanese scientists have developed a kite-shaped ‘space yacht’ that uses only solar power for propulsion. The spacecraft—IKAROS—would be launched into the space for a six-month mission to Venus. It is the first spacecraft to use such technology.

If everything goes well as planned, India will be ready to have Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) on the internet in seven Indian languages—Hindi, Bangla, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati—by 2011. The Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India has submitted its proposal the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organisation responsible for managing the internet’s domain name system, including IP address space assignments, based in California, USA.

Domain names are entered in the address bar of the browser to access a web-site. The domain name provides a unique identity and on clicking on a given domain name, the web page of the particular site opens up. Initially, the domain name will be available to seven Indian languages and later on to the all the country’s 22 official languages.