Ajay Kumar Sood, a member of the Prime Minister's Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council, has been appointed to the post for three years, replacing renowned biologist K Vijayaraghavan.
The Reserve Bank has decided to reduce the Ways and Means Advances (WMA) for States Governments and Union Territories (UTs) from Rs 51,560 crore to Rs 47,010 crore, considering the improvement in the pandemic situation.
Extreme poverty in India declined by 12.3 percentage points between 2011 and 2019, with rural areas doing better than urban centres, according to a working paper of the World Bank. The extreme poverty rate in India fell from 22.5% in 2011 to 10.2% in 2019.
Author Geetanjali Shree's novel 'Tomb of Sand' on Thursday became the first Hindi language work of fiction to be shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
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