Scheme SAMPADA renamed as Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) today approved renaming the new central food processing scheme SAMPADA as Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana (PMKSY) with an aim to benefit 20 lakh farmers and generate 5.30 lakh jobs by 2020. 

The objective of the PMKSY is to supplement agriculture by promoting processing and reducing farm wastage. 

The scheme with an allocation of Rs 6,000 crore is expected to leverage investment of Rs 31,400 crore. 

In May, the CCEA had approved the central scheme called SAMPADA (Scheme for Agro-Marine Processing and Development of Agro-Processing Clusters) by clubbing all ongoing schemes related to food processing. 

The CCEA today approved a proposal to rename the scheme SAMPADA as PMKSY for the period 2016-20 coterminous with the 14th Finance Commission cycle

The PMKSY will promote setting up of food processing units to boost availability of processed food items in the domestic market and for export purpose. The scheme will encourage creation of modern infrastructure with efficient supply chain management from farm gate to retail outlet. 

India and Nepal signed 8 (MoUs)

India and Nepal signed 8 memorandums of understanding (MoUs) on the second day of the neighbouring country's visiting Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba here today.

The  8 MoUs signed are:

1.    Modalities for utilization of India's housing grant component to support reconstruction of 50,000 houses.

2.    Three MoUs on Implementation of the Grant Component of India’s Post-Earthquake Reconstruction Package in the Education Sector, Cultural Heritage Sector and Health Sector in Nepal.

3.    MoU for Implementation Arrangement for Construction of Mechi Bridge under ADB’s SASEC Road Connectivity Programme (Tranche 2), Funded by India

4. Drug demand reduction and prevention of illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and precursor chemical and related matters.

5.    Agreement on cooperation in the field of standardisation and conformity assessment.

6.    An MoU was signed between the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nepal.

New Chairman of Railway Board – Ashwani Lohani

Ashwani Lohani appointed as the new Chairman of Railway Board after AK Mital tendered his resignation following recent train accidents.

Lohani who holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, currently is the Chairman & Managing Director of Air India. Lohani, an officer of the railway mechanical service, had served earlier as the Divisional Regional Manager of Delhi. He was also ITDC chairman as well as the director of the Rail Museum in the capital.

Microsoft launches 'Project Brainwave' for real-time AI 

Software giant Microsoft has announced Project Brainwave deep learning acceleration platform for real-time artificial intelligence (AI). 

With the help of ultra-low latency, the system processes requests as fast as it receives them. 

Real-time AI is becoming increasingly important as cloud infrastructures process live data streams, whether they be search queries, videos, sensor streams, or interactions with users. 

The 'Project Brainwave' uses the massive field-programmable gate array (FPGA) infrastructure that Microsoft has been deploying over the past few years. 

By attaching high-performance FPGAs directly to data centre network, it can serve DNNs as hardware microservices, where a DNN can be mapped to a pool of remote FPGAs and called by a server with no software in the loop .

Microsoft claimed that the system, designed for real-time AI, can handle complex, memory-intensive models such as Long Short Term Memories (LSTM), without using batching to juice throughput. 

Project Brainwave achieves unprecedented levels of demonstrated real-time AI performance on extremely challenging models.

Microsoft is also planning to bring the real-time AI system to users in Azure