Important Days & Dates Quiz: Important Weeks and Fortnights

National Nutrition Week is observed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development through anganwadis, schools and health centres to spread the message of balanced diet, and the whole of September is separately kept as a nutrition month.

The week is coordinated worldwide by the World Health Organization and UNICEF and argues for feeding a baby only mother's milk for the first six months, and for beginning that feeding within an hour of birth.

Wildlife Week is observed in national parks, sanctuaries, zoos and schools across India with exhibitions, walks and competitions, and it is coordinated by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.

Van Mahotsav was begun in 1950 on the initiative of K. M. Munshi, then the union minister for agriculture and food, and July was chosen because the monsoon has set in over most of the country by then and a sapling planted in wet ground has the best chance of…

The two dates were chosen for two events: on 4 October 1957 the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was placed in orbit, and on 10 October 1967 the Outer Space Treaty came into force.

The Central Vigilance Commission arranges the week around that date, and it opens with an integrity pledge taken in government offices and public sector undertakings; the same day is also observed as Rashtriya Ekta Diwas, the national unity day.

The week is observed to strengthen national integration and communal harmony, with each day given a theme such as minorities welfare, linguistic harmony and women's day, and it closes on 25 November with Communal Harmony Flag Day.

The week that follows, from 4 to 10 March, is used in factories, mines, ports and construction sites for safety pledges, drills, inspections and competitions, with a different theme each year.

A ship carrying cotton bales and explosives caught fire in the Bombay docks on 14 April 1944; the firefighters who went aboard to douse the blaze were killed when the cargo detonated, and Fire Service Day and the week that follows commemorate them.

A pakhwada is a fortnight, half of a lunar month, and government departments use it when a theme needs actual work rather than a ceremony; Swachhata Pakhwada, the cleanliness fortnight taken up by each ministry in turn, and Hindi Pakhwada, which begins on Hindi Diwas, are the standard examples.

On that day in 1949 the Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of the union, and the anniversary is kept as Hindi Diwas, after which offices run a fortnight of competitions and reviews of official language work.

The World Health Organization keeps the last week of April for this campaign, which presses the case for vaccination at every age and reminds governments of the children still missed by routine immunisation.