When was the undersea cable-based Chennai-Andaman and Nicobar (CANI) Project inaugurated and dedicated to the nation by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi ?

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Correct — C, August 10, 2020. The project is the Chennai to Andaman and Nicobar Islands submarine optical fibre cable, and the Prime Minister's Office announced it in these words: 'Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi will inaugurate and dedicate to the Nation through video conferencing the submarine Optical Fibre Cable (OFC) connecting Chennai and Port Blair on 10th August, 2020.' The engineering behind that sentence is substantial. About 2,300 kilometres of cable were laid at a cost of roughly Rs 1,224 crore; besides the Chennai to Port Blair trunk, the cable connects Port Blair onward to seven islands — Swaraj Dweep, which is Havelock, along with Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Great Nicobar, Long Island and Rangat. It carries two times 200 gigabits per second between Chennai and Port Blair and two times 100 gigabits per second on the island links. The Government funded it through the Universal Service Obligation Fund under the Department of Telecommunications, BSNL executed it, and TCIL was the technical consultant. Why it mattered is the part worth remembering rather than the date alone. Until the cable opened, the islands' telecommunications ran over satellite, and the same official note records that 4G mobile services there 'were constrained due to limited backhaul bandwidth provided via satellite'. Replacing a narrow, high-latency satellite pipe with a fibre trunk is what put telemedicine, tele-education, e-commerce and outsourcing work within reach of the islands, and it is why a cable-laying project was launched by the Prime Minister at all.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) August 10, 2019 — the correct day and month with the year moved back by one, which makes it the most dangerous option on the list. The project does have a second real date attached to it, and a candidate who has half-remembered it may be reaching for that: the foundation stone was laid by the Prime Minister at Port Blair on 30 December 2018. Nothing of note happened to the CANI project in August 2019, and a cable that was still being laid could not have been dedicated to the nation.  (b) August 15, 2022 — a date built by attaching Independence Day to a plausible year. Big connectivity announcements are often associated with 15 August in a candidate's memory, and 2022 was also the year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of independence, so the combination has a ring of importance. But the CANI cable was inaugurated on 10 August and by video conference, not from the Red Fort, and by August 2022 it had already been carrying traffic for two years.  (d) January 26, 2023 — Republic Day paired with a recent year, and the weakest option of the four. By January 2023 the submarine cable had been in service for nearly two and a half years. The option exists only to give the list a fourth national-day date, and any candidate who can place the project anywhere in the pandemic period will discard it immediately.

Concept: Almost all long-distance internet traffic in the world travels through submarine optical fibre cables rather than through satellites, and the reason is capacity and latency together. A fibre pair can carry hundreds of gigabits per second and a signal reaches the other end in milliseconds, while a geostationary satellite sits about 36,000 kilometres above the equator, so every hop up and down adds delay that no amount of bandwidth can remove. That is a nuisance for a web page and fatal for a video consultation with a doctor. Island territories are the hardest case, because they cannot be reached by terrestrial fibre at all, and until a cable is laid they are stuck with satellite backhaul that is expensive, limited and shared. The CANI cable solved exactly that problem for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Its funding route is worth knowing separately, because it recurs across rural and remote connectivity schemes: the Universal Service Obligation Fund, built from a levy on telecom operators' revenue and administered by the Department of Telecommunications, is the standing instrument by which India pays for connectivity in places where no commercial operator would build.

State PCS 2024 Q21 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q21 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer