Current Affairs including General Knowledge MCQs for CLAT UG, Page 12

The Government operationalised the indigenous Bharat Forecasting System, or BharatFS, in May 2025. It is a numerical weather prediction model operating at a horizontal resolution of 6 km. BharatFS uses a Triangular Cubic Octahedral dynamical grid. Its resolution is finer than the earlier global model operating at about 12 km. The Arka and Arunika high-performance computing systems support faster real-time forecasting. The model is intended to improve forecasts at block and cluster-of-panchayats levels and strengthen prediction of extreme weather. Higher resolution can represent local weather features more clearly, but accuracy also depends on observations, data quality, model physics, communication, and effective use of warnings.

The sixth BIMSTEC Summit was held in Bangkok, Thailand, on 4 April 2025. Its theme was "Prosperous, Resilient, and Open BIMSTEC". BIMSTEC has seven members: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. It links countries around the Bay of Bengal across South and Southeast Asia. Leaders adopted the Bangkok Vision 2030, the organisation's first vision document. They also signed an Agreement on Maritime Transport Cooperation to improve movement of cargo and people and support regional trade and travel. Declarations and agreements establish direction, but their practical value depends on national implementation, financing, coordination, and measurable follow-through.

The Gyan Bharatam Mission is a Ministry of Culture initiative for India's manuscript heritage. It restructures and expands the earlier National Mission for Manuscripts. Its work includes a nationwide survey and registration of manuscripts held by institutions and private custodians, scientific conservation, preventive preservation, and digitisation. The Mission envisages a National Digital Manuscripts Library or repository to improve access for research and knowledge sharing. Cataloguing and metadata remain essential because a digital image without origin and description can lose evidentiary value. Digitisation reduces barriers to access, but physical conservation, custodial consent, accurate description, and secure storage remain necessary.

BharatGen was launched on 2 June 2025 at the BharatGen Summit. It is a government-funded initiative to develop sovereign foundational artificial-intelligence models for Indian languages and contexts. The initiative is multilingual and multimodal. Its models work across text, speech, and vision or document understanding, with a roadmap covering all 22 Scheduled Indian languages. BharatGen is developed under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems and advanced through the IndiaAI Mission. It aims to support research and applications in areas such as governance, agriculture, and public services. Domestic development can improve linguistic inclusion and contextual relevance. It does not remove the need to test accuracy, bias, privacy, security, and performance in each use case.

One Nation One Subscription, or ONOS, began its first phase on 1 January 2025. It provides eligible government higher-education and central research institutions with digital access to scholarly journals. Phase I covers more than 13,000 journals from 30 publishers and over 6,300 institutions. INFLIBNET centrally coordinates subscription payments and digital access. The scheme aims to reduce differences in research access, including for institutions in smaller cities. It complements research initiatives such as the Anusandhan National Research Foundation. Access alone does not produce strong research. Institutions also need awareness, training, reliable connectivity, ethical research practices, and assessment of actual journal use.

On 15 January 2025, INS Surat, INS Nilgiri, and INS Vaghsheer were commissioned together at the Naval Dockyard in Mumbai. INS Surat is the fourth and final ship of the Project 15B guided-missile destroyer class. INS Nilgiri is the first ship of the Project 17A stealth-frigate class. INS Vaghsheer is the sixth and final submarine of Project 75, the Scorpene-class submarine programme. The commissioning of a destroyer, frigate, and submarine on one day highlighted indigenous shipbuilding and fleet modernisation. Commissioning adds capability, but readiness also depends on crews, maintenance, logistics, training, and operational integration.