28 May 2018: UPSC Exam PIB Summary & Analysis

108th session of UNWTO Executive council

• The Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Tourism, Shri K. J. Alphons along with a delegation of senior officials attended the 108thsession of UNWTO Executive Council held in San Sebastian, Spain. 
• The Executive council decided that in order to address new challenge and trends, the organization will pay special attention to scaling up innovation and digitization in the sector.
• During the three day Executive Council meeting, Sh. K. J. Alphons chaired the ‘Programme and Budget Committee’ meeting of UNWTO.
• In the opening remarks, the Minister highlighted the role of tourism in socio-economic development through job creation, enterprise and environment development and foreign exchange earnings.
• The Minister also brought out the impact of innovation and new technology, which have become key factor for competitiveness of every economic sector including tourism.

About UNWTO

• It is the United Nations agency responsible for the promotion of responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism.
• The UNWTO Executive Council represents the Organization’s governing body whose task is to take all necessary measures in consultation with the Secretary-General, for implementation of its own decisions and recommendations of the Assembly and report thereupon to the Assembly.
• The Council meets at least twice a year, the next to be held in Bahrain.
• The council consists of 30 Full Members elected by the assembly in proportion of one member for every Five Full Members, in accordance with the Rules of Procedure laid down by the Assembly with a view to achieving fair and equitable geographical distribution.

PM interacts with Ujjwala beneficiaries

• The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, interacted with Ujjwala beneficiaries across the country, through video conference.
• Three Ujjwala beneficiaries were present at each of over 600 centres across the length and breadth of the country, for this interaction.
• Approximately 4 crore women in rural areas have received LPG connections so far, through the UjjwalaYojana.
• In all, nearly 10 crore new LPG connections have been issued in the four years since 2014, as compared to 13 crore in the nearly six decade period from 1955 to 2014.
• The Prime Minister said that 69 percent villages in India now have 100 percent LPG penetration, while 81 percent villages have more than 75 percent LPG penetration.
• The Prime Minister emphasized that the Union Government has been paying attention to ensure that there are no middlemen involved in this scheme, and the beneficiaries are chosen through a transparent process.

NIC launches new data centre

• National Informatics Centre (NIC) has launched a new data centre in Bhubaneshwar.
• Bhubaneswar becomes the fourth National data centre of National Informatics Centre (NIC) after Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune.
• The new cloud-enabled National Data Centre aims to offer round-the-clock operations with secure hosting for various e-governance applications of Central and State Governments and has ability to support 35,000 virtual servers.

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