It provides for stringent punishment including death penalty for those convicted of raping girls below the age of 12 years.

The minimum punishment in case of rape of women has been increased from rigorous imprisonment of seven years to 10 years, extendable to life imprisonment.

In case of rape of a girl under 16 years, the minimum punishment has been increased from 10 years to 20 years, extendable to imprisonment for rest of life, which means jail term till the convicts’ “natural life”.

The punishment for gang rape of a girl below 16 years will invariably be imprisonment for the rest of life of the convict.

Stringent punishment for rape of a girl under 12 years has been provided with the minimum jail term being 20 years which may go up to life in prison or death sentence.

Gang rape of a girl under 12 years of age will invite punishment of jail term for the rest of life or death

Support by the Centre: Under the scheme, central assistance is provided for opening of new Model Degree Colleges(MDCs) in these districts and in unserved & underserved districts in North Eastern and Himalayan States.

Kind of support: The central support provided under the component of new MDCs is infrastructural in nature in which funds are released for creation of Colleges with requisite infrastructure such as appropriate number of class rooms, library, laboratory, faculty rooms, toilet blocks and other essential requirements for technologically advanced facilities.

States’ role: Under this component, a commitment is given by the State Governments that all recurring expenditure (including salaries) in respect of the MDC being established, will be borne by the respective State Government. Additionally, under a separate component of RUSA viz., Faculty Recruitment Support, central support is provided for creation of additional posts of Assistant Professors.

Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme (CSS), launched in 2013 aims at providing strategic funding to eligible state higher educational institutions.

The central funding (in the ratio of 60:40 for general category States, 90:10 for special category states and 100% for union territories) would be norm based and outcome dependent. The funding would flow from the central ministry through the state governments/union territories to the State Higher Education Councils before reaching the identified institutions. The funding to states would be made on the basis of critical appraisal of State Higher Education Plans, which would describe each state’s strategy to address issues of equity, access and excellence in higher education.

Objectives: The key objectives of RUSA are to improve access, equity and quality in higher education through planned development of higher education at the state level. Objectives include creating new academic institutions, expanding and upgrading the existing ones, developing institutions that are self-reliant in terms of quality education, professionally managed, and characterized by greater inclination towards research and provide students with education that is relevant to them as well the nation as a whole.

Components: RUSA would create new universities through upgradation of existing autonomous colleges and conversion of colleges in a cluster. It would create new model degree colleges, new professional colleges and provide infrastructural support to universities and colleges. Faculty recruitment support, faculty improvements programmes and leadership development of educational administrators are also an important part of the scheme. In order to enhance skill development the existing central scheme of Polytechnics has been subsumed within RUSA. A separate component to synergise vocational education with higher education has also been included in RUSA. Besides these, RUSA also supports reforming, restructuring and building capacity of institutions in participating state.

Key features: These microprocessors can be adapted by others, as the design is open source. They optimise power use and compete with international units such as the Cortex A5 from Advanced RISC Machines (ARM). At a frequency of 350 MHz, RISECREEK can meet the demands of defence and strategic equipment such as NAVIC (Indian Regional Navigation Satellite) and Internet of Things (IoT) electronics.

Project Shakti: The Shakti plan started in 2014 as an IIT-M initiative. Last year, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology funded a part of the project. The Shakti project is not aimed at only building processors. It also aims to build high speed interconnects for servers and supercomputers based on variants of the RapidiIO and GenZ standards. These are key to build large clusters of processors to get Petaflop and Exaflop level supercomputers

Base year revision for estimates of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Index of Industrial Production (IIP) and Consumer Price Index Number (CPI) were carried out. Steps have been initiated for next revision of base years.

Government has recently constituted a Committee for Sub-National Accounts under the Chairmanship of Prof. Ravindra H. Dholakia, ex-IIM, to upgrade existing norms and evolve new ones for computation of economic data at State and District levels for revision of the base year of GDP. The earlier such Committee was set up in the year 1972.

Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is an autonomous body under the Ministry. The R.C. Bose Centre for Cryptology and Security was set up in the Indian Statistical Institute for conducting research in the field of cryptology and security and organize training courses in the subject area. The ISI has also established Sampling and Official Statistical Unit (SOSU) at Kolkata for undertaking research in the theoretical, applied statistics and economics. Financial support was provided to ISI for development of infrastructure of Tezpur (Assam) Centre.

Government has declared 29th June, the birth anniversary of Late Prof. P. C. Mahalanobis, as Statistics Day. A theme is announced on each Statistics Day for focusing attention by statistical agencies for a year. The 12thStatistics Day was celebrated on 29th June, 2018, which was the 125th birth anniversary of Late Prof. Mahalanobis. The theme “Quality Assurance in Official Statistics” was announced on this day. A commemorative coin of Rs 125 and circulation coin of Rs 5 denomination were released by Hon’ble Vice President of India.