Prelims Focus 7th November 2025

Baliyatra Festival

In News: The President gives greetings during the historic Baliyatra festival to Odisha people.

• Another festival, Baliyatra, is an annual Odia festival held on the day of Kartika Purnima in Odisha (then called Kalinga) in commemoration of the ancient maritime Odisha Odisha to Southeast Asian connections, especially Bali, Java, and Sumatra.
• The festival has a legend of Taapoi and it consists of rituals like Bhalukuni Osha (or Khudurukuni Osha) and Bada Osha.
• People have a traditional float of miniature boats with lights along Mahanadi River during Baliyatra as a sign of the sea expeditions of their ancestors.

Umngot River

In News: The Umngot river in Meghalaya has become unusually cloudy and it has caused concerns with regard to pollution caused by highway construction efforts.

• Umngot River or Dawki or Wah Umngot is a river flowing in Dawki in West Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya and is known due to its crystal clear and transparent water that makes the riverbed visible underneath.
• It borders on the India-Bangladesh frontier, as a natural boundary as well as a significant trade route between both nations.
• The discoloration, which can only be spotted during the monsoons, is being attributed to the construction works being done to upgrade Shillong-Dawki road.

State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) Report 2025

In News: According to the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) Report 2025 by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), human-driven land degradation affects approximately 1.7 billion people globally by reducing crop yields by around 10% or more in these areas. 

• This pervasive and silent crisis undermines agricultural productivity, threatens food security, rural livelihoods, and damages ecosystems worldwide. 
• The report highlights that the largest affected populations are concentrated in eastern and southern Asia, regions burdened by extensive degradation and high population density, with India experiencing some of the highest yield losses due to land degradation.
• The primary driver of this land degradation and associated deforestation (accounting for nearly 90% of forest loss) is unsustainable agricultural expansion, along with factors such as deforestation, overgrazing, unsustainable cropping and irrigation, and overuse of agrochemicals. 
• The consequences include biodiversity loss, soil erosion, water scarcity, increased vulnerability to floods and droughts, and greenhouse gas emissions.
• The report also emphasizes the social and economic impacts: 47 million children under five suffer from stunted growth in regions where severe yield losses coincide with poverty and food insecurity. 
• Land degradation leads to cropland abandonment (about 3.6 million hectares annually) further threatening food production.

Project Suncatcher

In News: Google’s Project Suncatcher, announced in November 2025, is a cutting-edge research initiative exploring the deployment of AI data centers in space. 

• The project aims to build constellations of solar-powered satellites equipped with Google’s specialized Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) designed for AI and machine learning tasks. 
• These satellites will orbit in low Earth sun-synchronous orbit, leveraging nearly continuous solar energy, which is up to eight times more efficient than Earth-based solar panels, enabling sustainable and scalable AI compute capacity.
• The satellites will be linked using high-speed free-space optical communication capable of transferring data at tens of terabits per second, forming a modular and tightly coordinated network similar to terrestrial data centers but in orbit. 
• This space-based infrastructure seeks to overcome the limitations of traditional AI data centers, notably energy consumption, environmental impact, cooling challenges, and scalability constraints.
• Project Suncatcher plans to launch two prototype satellites by early 2027 in partnership with Planet Labs to test the hardware’s performance and durability against space conditions such as radiation and thermal extremes. 
• The initiative is part of Google’s tradition of moonshot projects that tackle complex scientific and engineering challenges, aiming for a transformative leap in AI infrastructure by harnessing the Sun’s power directly in space.

Download as PDF