Current Affairs for BANK, IBPS Exams - 04 August 2022

::National::

What is Craft Village Initiative?

Crafts are an important part of Indian culture. These crafts thrive in the country's outlying regions. Most crafts in India are practiced as a legacy of the past and the family. Craftspeople have inherited them from their forefathers, and this tradition has been carried on for centuries.
The concept of a crafts village emerged to serve the purpose of gathering most of the craft specimens and craftsmen under one roof. At a craft village, you can get up close and personal with the artisans as they create their wares right in front of your eyes.
The infrastructure and atmosphere of a crafts village are also designed in the style of a village to give visitors a sense of rural life in India. Crafts village also functions as a market, as you can purchase artefacts at lower prices than in the general market. As a result, these craft huts serve multiple functions from a single platform.
Craft Village will promote handicrafts as a viable and remunerative livelihood option for artisans in the clusters, thereby safeguarding the country's rich artisanal heritage. Approximately 1000 artisans will benefit directly from this programme across the country.
Under the "Linking Textile with Tourism" initiative, major tourist destinations are being linked with handicraft clusters, and infrastructure supports combined with soft interventions are being proposed.
In this regard, 8 Craft Villages have already been established in Raghurajpur (Odisha), Tirupati (Andhra Pradesh), Vadaj (Gujarat), Naini (Uttar Pradesh), Anegundi (Karnataka), Mahabalipuram (Tamil Nadu), TajGanj (Uttar Pradesh), and Amer (Rajasthan) for overall development of the villages wherein craft promotion and tourism are being undertaken.

Printed Study Materials for IBPS, SBI Bank Exam

::International::

US passes 'chips bill' to boost semiconductor production

President Joe Biden is set to sign into law a bipartisan bill to invest billions of dollars in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and science research, with the aim of boosting U.S. competitiveness with China and other foreign rivals.
The legislation marks a win for Biden, who campaigned on reaching across the aisle and has pushed Congress to pass the legislation as a matter of necessity for America’s economy and national security.
Biden, who is suffering from a relapse of Covid, appeared virtually at a ceremony Tuesday with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., as she signed an executive directive to implement the Chips and Science Act.
The bill, dubbed the Chips and Science Act, includes more than $52 billion for U.S. companies producing computer chips, as well as billions more in tax credits to encourage investment in chip manufacturing. It also provides tens of billions of dollars to fund scientific research and development, and to spur the innovation and development of other U.S. technologies.
The House and Senate passed the bill last week with near-unanimous Democratic support. One-third of Republican senators backed the bill, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Two dozen House Republicans also voted for it, though others withdrew their support on the eve of the final vote after Senate Democrats unveiled plans to quickly pass an unrelated partisan reconciliation bill.
Democrats want that tax-and-spending package, helmed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., to come to a vote before Congress leaves Washington, D.C., for the August recess. They hope to pass it without needing Republican votes in the Senate, where the parties are split 50-50 and Vice President Kamala Harris holds the tie-breaking vote.
McConnell had previously warned Democrats that GOP lawmakers wouldn’t back the semiconductor bill if they continued to work on a reconciliation package. Talks between Schumer and Manchin on such a package had appeared to sputter weeks earlier — but just hours after the Senate voted to pass the Chips and Science act, the Democrats revealed that they had struck a deal.

::Economy::

DRI (Directorate of Revenue Intelligence) unearths customs evasion of Rs 2,217 crore by Vivo Mobile India Pvt Ltd

The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) informed that it has detected Rs 2217 crores custom duty evasion by Vivo Mobile India Private Limited. The information was shared through a press release by the Press Information Bureau. Vivo Mobile India Private Limited is a subsidiary company of Vivo Communication Technology Co. Ltd., Guangdong, China. Vivo Mobile India is engaged in the business of manufacturing, assembling, wholesale trading as well as distributing of mobile handsets and accessories thereof.
The press release said, during an investigation pertaining to M/s Vivo Mobile India Private Limited, DRI detected Customs duty evasion of around Rs 2,217 crore. During the probe, DRI officials launched raids at Vivo India’s industrial plants, which resulted in the seizure of irrefutable evidence suggesting deliberate mis-declaration in the specifications of certain components sourced by the organization to be utilized in the production of cellphones.
Vivo India misleadingly contended unlawful duty exemption savings of Rs 2,217 crore as a byproduct of this misinformation. With the conclusion of the inquiry, a Show Cause Notice was served to Vivo India, requesting Rs. 2,217 crores in Customs duty under the terms of the Customs Act of 1962. Vivo India has voluntarily made a deposit of Rs 60 crore to cover its differential duty burden. It is notable that, show cause notices demanding duty of Rs. 4,403.88 crores have recently been issued to Oppo Mobiles India Private Limited as part of another series of inquiries by DRI.
Gov. withdraws Data Protection Bill, 2021, will present new legislation
The Centre on Wednesday withdrew the long-awaited Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill, 2019 to replace it with a new bill with a ‘comprehensive framework’ and ‘contemporary digital privacy laws’.
The PDP bill was first introduced in LokSabha on December 11, 2019. The bill was referred to Joint Parliamentary Committee, which tabled its report in LokSabha on December 16, 2021. The committee proposed a single law for dealing with both personal and non-personal datasets. The report was also under dispute as it suggested moving towards complete localisation of data.
"The government will bring a set of new legislation for a comprehensive legal framework for the digital economy," IT Minister AshwiniVaishnaw, who moved for the withdrawal of the Bill in the House, told PTI.
A statement containing the reasons for the withdrawal was circulated to the members of LokSabha. Reportedly the statement included that the government was working on a comprehensive legal framework considering 81 amendments and 12 recommendations proposed by the JPC.
After the Bill was withdrawn, Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrashekhar tweeted that this will soon be replaced by a comprehensive framework of global standard laws including digital privacy laws for contemporary and future challenges and catalyse Prime Minister NarendraModi's vision.
He said the JCP report on the Personal Data protection bill had identified many issues that were relevant but beyond the scope of a modern Digital Privacy law.
He added that privacy is a fundamental right of Indian citizens and having a trillion-dollar Digital Economy requires global standard cyber laws.
“This will soon be replaced by a comprehensive framework of global standard laws, including digital privacy laws, for contemporary and future challenges and catalyse PM NarendraModi’s vision of India Techade,” Chandrasekhar said.
The withdrawn data protection Bill had also proposed the setting up of a Data Protection Authority.

::Science and tech::

Alpha Fold: Tool capable of predicting protein structures developed

An artificial intelligence (AI) network developed by Google AI offshoot DeepMind has made a gargantuan leap in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence.
Deep Mind’s program, called AlphaFold, outperformed around 100 other teams in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. The results were announced on 30 November, at the start of the conference — held virtually this year — that takes stock of the exercise.
“This is a big deal,” says John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who co-founded CASP in 1994 to improve computational methods for accurately predicting protein structures. “In some sense the problem is solved.”
AlphaFold came top of the table at the last CASP — in 2018, the first year that London-based DeepMind participated. But, this year, the outfit’s deep-learning network was head-and-shoulders above other teams and, say scientists, performed so mind-bogglingly well that it could herald a revolution in biology.
“It’s a game changer,” says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, who assessed the performance of different teams in CASP. AlphaFold has already helped him find the structure of a protein that has vexed his lab for a decade, and he expects it will alter how he works and the questions he tackles. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything,” Lupas adds.
In some cases, AlphaFold’s structure predictions were indistinguishable from those determined using ‘gold standard’ experimental methods such as X-ray crystallography and, in recent years, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). AlphaFold might not obviate the need for these laborious and expensive methods — yet — say scientists, but the AI will make it possible to study living things in new ways.

::Sports::

Birmingham Commonwealth Games: Malaysia beat India 3-1 in final to win gold in mixed team badminton

Malaysia beat India in a reverse of the mixed team event final result from four years ago to win gold at Birmingham 2022.
In a fierce contest that lasted almost exactly four hours, Malaysia came through to seal a 3-1 win as Pearly Tan Koong Lee and Thinaah Muralitharan clinched the gold with women's doubles victory.
A win in the men's doubles put Malaysia ahead, but PusarlaVenkataSindhulevelled the scores for India in a hard-fought 2-0 women's singles win.
NG Tze Yong put Malaysia back in front before the women's doubles finished the job.