Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday said that Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati fearlessly propagated "swadharma, swabhasha and swaraj" in the pre-independence era when talking about these was prohibited.

Speaking at the 148th Foundation Day of Arya Samaj, Mr Shah said Maharshi Dayanand awakened the soul of the country by establishing the Arya Samaj. He said that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, government has decided to celebrate the 200th birth anniversary of Maharishi Dayanand. He added that Mr Modi is working to awaken the country, and the basic concept has been taken from the life and works of Maharishi Dayanand.

The Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO will launch OneWeb India-2 mission from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on March 26. Under a commercial agreement with NewSpace India Limited, ISRO will launch 72 satellites of the UK-based Network Access Associates Limited and place them in low Earth orbits.  

NewSpace is the commercial wing of ISRO. The first set of 36 satellites was launched on October 23 last year by the LVM3 M2 launch vehicle. In the second mission on March 26th, the remaining 36 satellites weighing about 5805 kgs will be placed in 450 km circular low Earth orbit by LVM3 M3 launch vehicle. The LVM3 had five consecutive successful missions, including the Chandrayaan 2 mission. The satellites offer space based broadband internet services to the corners of the world. After the launch, Access Associates Limited will have over 600 satellites in space offering internet from space services in various countries.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the new International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Area office and Innovation Centre in India in New Delhi today afternoon. ITU is the United Nations specialised agency for information and communication technologies and its Headquarters is in Geneva.

India had signed a Host Country Agreement in March last year with ITU for the establishment of Area Office. The Area Office in India also envisaged to have an Innovation Centre, making it unique among other area offices of ITU. The Area Office, which is fully funded by India, is located on the second floor of the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) building at Mehrauli in the national capital. The programme will witness the participation of IT and Telecom Ministers of various Area Offices of ITU, the Secretary General and other senior officials of ITU, Heads of United Nations and other international bodies in India, Ambassadors, Industry Leaders, Start-up and MSME, leaders of Academia, students and other stakeholders.

An earthquake of 6.6 magnitudes hit the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan at 10:17 PM last night, March 21. As per the National Center for Seismology, the tremors struck at a depth of 156 kilometres. The affected countries include India, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, China, Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

Strong tremors were felt in North India including Delhi-NCR, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. The tremors triggered panic among the people as they came out of their homes. So far, no loss of life or property has been reported in India. 

In G-20,  the second Sustainable Finance Working Group meeting will take place at Udaipur in Rajasthan today, March 22. The focus is to identify relevant policies and best practices for mobilising sustainable finance to help ensure global growth and stability.

A workshop on the sidelines of the meeting is being organised to build a better understanding among G-20 members and strengthen policy and other recommendations towards enhanced financing for Sustainable Development Goals. Member countries will try to identify relevant policies and best practices for mobilizing sustainable finance to help ensure global growth and stability.

President Droupadi Murmu will confer Padma Awards for the year 2023, at a Civil Investiture Ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan today evening, March 22. Of the 106 Padma awards that were announced, six are Padma Vibhushan, nine are Padma Bhushan and 91 are Padma Shri. Nineteen of the awardees are women. Oral Rehydration Solution, ORS pioneer Dilip Mahalanobis will be awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously in the field of Medicine (Pediatrics). 

He pioneered the wide use of ORS, believed to have saved over five crore lives globally. Former Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav will be awarded Padma Vibhushan posthumously in the field of public affairs. Tabla Maestro Zakir Hussain will also be awarded Padma Vibhushan. Those who will be honoured with Padma Bhushan include Kannada novelist and screenwriter S L Bhyrappa, Industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla, and Author and Philanthropist Sudha Murthy.

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library has launched an ambitious project to digitize the research material in its possession. Under this project, the goal is to ensure the conversion of the entire India House Collection of the Library. Culture Ministry said, this consists of 40 thousand books, reports, periodicals, 55 lakh pages of archival documents, and microfilms in digital form.

AIR correspondent reports that in order to make all the digitized materials accessible from any part of the world, government has decided to put them on Internet through a state-of-the-art digital platform and, Open Digital Library and Archives. This will allow researchers on modern and contemporary India to search for documents relevant for their research. Users can read them on computer and download the documents by paying service charges. 

Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra today said India and Japan signed two documents on the sidelines of the bilateral talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. The agreements include Renewal of Memorandum of Cooperation in Japanese language, and Exchange of notes on JICA loan for 300 billion Yen on Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed railway project. Briefing media in New Delhi this afternoon,  Mr Kwatra said Prime Minister Modi expressed his desire with Prime Minister Kishida to declare the next year as the year of Youth Exchanges between the two countries. He said Mr Kishida formally invited Mr Modi to G7 Hiroshima Summit.
 
The Foreign Secretary said that India and Japan have been talking about how India and Japan can cooperate on the Act East. They are talking about how connectivity projects can be built which link India's north-east with the rest of the countries that fall under Act East.

The three-day Nepal-India Literature Festival concluded with the adoption of a 10-point Biratnagar declaration.
The festival was jointly organized by Biratnagar Metropolitan City and Krantidhara Literature Academy of Meerut, India. A 10-point declaration highlighting the mutual promotion of literature between Nepal and India was adopted on Sunday.

The declaration included translating Nepali literature into Hindi and Hindi into Nepali for mutual promotion, undertaking further research on connecting Mahabharat-era King Birat's palace with the Mahabharat Circuit in coordination with the Department of Archeology and historians and encouraging young literary writers to further explore the archaeological artefacts.

The second Sustainable Finance Working Group (SFWG) meeting under India’s G20 Presidency will begin today at Udaipur in Rajasthan. The three-day meeting will focus on the identification of relevant policies and best practices for mobilizing sustainable finance to help ensure global growth and stability.

This is the first time for the SFWG to go beyond climate-related issues and engage in dialogue for enabling enhanced financing for select  sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) primarily through nature-related data and reporting and social impact investing.