DAILY PRELIMS BOOSTER 9TH NOVEMBER 2022

1) Vikram-S: It is India’s First Privately developed Rocket. Vikram-S has been developed with the Support of ISRO and IN-SPACe Agencies and Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace.

• The mission named ‘Prarambh’ (the beginning), since it is the first mission for Skyroot.
• With this maiden mission, Skyroot is set to become the first private space company in India to launch a rocket into space.
• The launch mission will be a suborbital spaceflight, and will carry three customer payloads to the intended orbit. The Vikram series, named after the founder of India’s space programme Dr Vikram Sarabhai, are all-carbon-fibre structures that can launch up to 800 kg of payloads to the Low Earth Orbit.

2) Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI): The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has completed MTSI with field videography of the country’s 576 languages.

• It is a project that “surveys the mother tongues, which are returned consistently across two and more Census decades”. It documents the linguistic features of the selected languages.
• As per an analysis of 2011 linguistic census data in 2018, more than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India as mother tongues which is grouped into 121 mother tongues.
• According to the 2011 linguistic census, Hindi is the most widely spoken mother tongue, with 52.8 crore people or 43.6 per cent of the population declaring it as the mother tongue.
• The next is Bengali, mother tongue for 9.7 crore individuals, and accounting for 8 per cent of the population.

3) Garuda-VII Air Exercise: It is a bilateral exercise between Indian Air Force (IAF) and French Air and Space Force (FASF).

• Ex Garuda-VII is also the first occasion for the light combat aircraft (LCA) Tejas and the light combat helicopter (LCH) Prachand to participate in any international exercise.

4) Pseudohelice Annamalai: Researchers of Annamalai University have discovered a new species of estuarine crab in the mangroves of Parangipettai near the Vellar River estuary in the Cuddalore district in Tamil Nadu.

• This is the first-ever record of this genus, Pseudohelice, collected from high intertidal areas
• So far, only two species — Pseudohelice subquadrate and Pseudohelice Latreille.
• it is distinguished by dark purple to dark grey coloring, with irregular light brown, yellowish brown, or white patches on the posterior carapace with light brown chelipeds.
• The new species is small and has a maximum width of up to 20 mm.

5) National Population Register (NPR): is a register of usual residents of the country.

• It includes both Indian citizens as well as a foreign citizen.
• According to the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003, a usual resident is a person who has resided in a local area for the past 6 months or more or a person who intends to reside in that area for the next 6 months or more.
• It is being prepared at the local (Village/sub-Town), sub-District, District, State and National level under provisions of the Citizenship Act 1955 and the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. The 1^st NPR was prepared in 2010 and updation of this data was done during 2015 by conducting door to door survey.