News in Short

• The Karuppur kalamkari paintings and the Kallakurichi wood carvings recently received the geographical indication (GI) tags.
• Both of these art forms are traditional in nature. While the paintings are made on a cotton cloth using pens or brushes made out of bamboo tree and coconut tree stems, the wood carving is specialised in carving temple-related items and also furniture, using traditional designs.
• The application for registering Karuppur kalamkari paintings for the tag was moved by the Tamil Nadu Handicrafts Development Corporation (Poompuhar).

• Former bureaucrat Amit Khare, who last month retired as higher education secretary, has been appointed as advisor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for two years on contract basis.
• Mr Khare, a 1985 batch (retired) IAS officer of Jharkhand cadre, had superannuated on September 30.
• The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has approved the appointment of Khare as advisor to the prime minister in Prime Minister’s Office, in the rank and scale of secretary to government of India, on contract basis.

• Three US-based economists won the 2021 Nobel prize for economics for pioneering research on the labour market impacts of minimum wage, immigration and education.
• Canadian-born David Card of the University of California at Berkeley was awarded one half of the prize, while the other half was shared by Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dutch-born Guido Imbens, from Stanford University.
• Card worked on research that used restaurants in New Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania to measure the effects of increasing the minimum wage.

• Prime Minister Narendra Modilaunched the Gati Shakti National Master Plan for multi-modal connectivity.
• The Rs 100 lakh crore plan, which seeks to speed up and expand infrastructure projects, is intended to enhance the country’s self reliance.
• Economic Zones like textile clusters, pharmaceutical clusters, defence corridors, electronic parks, industrial corridors, fishing clusters, agri zones will be covered to improve connectivity and make Indian businesses more competitive.
• It will also leverage technology extensively including spatial planning tools with ISRO imagery developed by BiSAG-N (Bhaskaracharya National Geoinformatics).

• India’s largest port operator Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSE.NS) said that its terminals would no longer handle export and import of container cargoes from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan from Nov. 15.
• This advisory will apply to all terminals operated by APSEZ and including third party terminals at any APSEZ port till further notice.
• On September 13, around 3,000 kilograms of heroin was seized from two containers at Gujarat’s Mundra port, run by the Adani Group. The consignment had come from Afghanistan, one of the largest illegal producers of opium.