Current Affairs for BANK, IBPS Exams

30 November 2015

National

Climate deal negotiations in Paris

• Paris prepares to host the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change conference beginning from 1st December raising expectations that the participation of nearly 150Presidents.
• Prime Ministers and heads of state in a leader-ship event will bring about agood agreement.
• U.S. PresidentBarack Obama is to join China’s President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister NarendraModi, is intended to signal the seriousnesswith whichclimate change is being approached at CoP21.
• For India and other developing countries, the momentum that has built around theParis conference is an opportunity to press their case for funds from the FirstWorld.

Fate of GST Bill depends on ‘intolerance’ debate

• The Congress has decided not to engage with the ruling BJP on the contentious Goods and Services Tax(GST) Bill until the issue of“intolerance” is debated in Parliament
• The Congress’s demands are that the tax cap be fixed at18 per cent, the 1 per cent inter-State cess be scrapped and independentaccountability be ensured.
• some “experienced leaders” had urged caution arguing that since the ruling parties of the “consumer States” were willing to back the Bill, the Congress might lose their support in Parliament, and its influence as the leading party of the Opposition

Enough funds for clean Ganga project

• Union Minister Nitin Gadkari on Sunday said the Central government is giving priority to making the Ganga pollution-free and there is no dearth of funds for the ‘Clean Ganga' mission.
• Projects worth crores of ru-pees have been launched to make the river pollution-free. A number of ghats and gar-dens would be built on its banks boosting tourism and provide a source of income for at least 10 lakh youths.
• He was speaking at a symposium on conservation of the Ganga organised at Chaudhary Charan Singh University here, which was also attended by a number of leaders including Union Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti.
• The government alone can't keep the Ganga clean. It can make the river pollution free by spending Rs 20,000 crore but the society has to come forward to keep it that way.

INDIA & WORLD

Importance of India in climate change deal

• The U.S. appears careful not to be confrontational with India ahead of theParis climate conference.
• US is partnering with India on responsible energy development. India is a strategic partner that has one of the largest economies in the world, and it recognizes the critical importance of in-creasing energy security, reducing emissions,and improving resilience in the face of cli-mate change.
• We maintain a robust programme of cooperation in this area, including the highly successful U.S.-IndiaPartnership to AdvanceClean Energy (PACE)
• This cooperation strengthens our bilateral relation-ship, enhances economic growth in both countries,and promotes the development of new and innovative technologies and products to address our shared challenges.
• The U.S. would also pitch for expanding the donor base, “the number of parties who are prepared to contribute financing to poor countries,” and would seekmore private investments.
• The onus of attracting such private investment would be on developing countries that should “create the enabling environment,”.

INTERNATIONAL

Problems in Nepal persists

• India-Nepal ties hit another flashpoint on Sunday after 13 personnel of the Sash-astra SeemaBal (SSB) were detained by the Nepal ArmedPolice Force (APF) in Jhapa(Nepal).
• They were released after several hours in custody of the government would not react officially, so as not to further harm bilateral relations that have deteriorated since Nepal promulgated a Constitution that India has objected to.

Migrant flow into Turkey and Consequences

• European Union (EU) leaders will offer Turkey cash and a boost for its membership bid in exchange for its cooperation with the migrant crisis at a summit.
• The European Union is expected to agree a three billion euro ($3.2 billion) aid package for Turkey to help it stop the flow of refugees to Europe from the conflict in Syria, 2.2 million of whom are currently in Turkey.
• Prime Minister Ahmet Da-vutoglu, standing in for PresidentRecepTayyip Erdogan, is also set to win a deal for the opening in December of a new chapter in Turkey's stalled accession talks for the 28-nation bloc.
• But conditions are likely to be attached to both, while Turkey's shooting down of a Russian jet on the Syrian border on Tuesday will also add strain to an already complicated relationship between Brussels and Ankara.
• Fuelled by the Syrian war, some 850,000 people have entered the EU this year and more than 3,500 have died or gone missing in what has be-come Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II.
• Turkey is the main gateway for migrants and refugees to reach Europe, and Germany has pushed for the summit as it is the main destination for most of the people arriving in the bloc.

SCIENCE AND TECH

Concern over large gaps in airspace security

• There is no guarantee that India's air defence systems would be able to detect enemy nation, or a terrorist organisation and launch a counter-at-tack to shoot it down before it wreaks havoc on targets.
• The vulnerability of Indian cities and other strategic as-sets have been exercising military planners for long. Their efforts to develop a robust air defence network received a major boost with the first successful test of the Long Range Surface to Air Missile (LR-SAM), jointly developed by India and Israel, from an Israeli warship on Thursday.
• The test came just a few days after the November 22 successful interception of Orissa by an Advanced Air Defence (AAD) missile of a dummy in-coming ballistic missile.
• However, officials point out that given the large airspace, there still remain significant gaps in the air defence network and most systems in service, largely old Russian ones, are in urgent need of re-placement.

BUSINESS & ECONOMY

Liquidity situation is tightening during festive season

• An increase in consumer spending during the festival season has pushed up the short-term money market rates.
• This happens at a time when the interest rates are supposed to soften after the central bank reduced its repo rate, the one at which the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) lends money to commercial banks and used as tool to control inflation.
• As a result, banks are expecting the central bank to provide some comfort by infusing more money into the banking system in its fifth bi-monthly monetary policy review scheduled December 1.
• On an aver-age there are outflows to the tune of Rs.50,000 crore during the festival season. But this year the amount went up was be-tween 15 and 20 per cent.
• Bankers said since the central bank has taken an accommodative monetary policy stance and reduced policy interest rate by 125 bps in this calendar year, which is now at 6.75 per cent, it could ad-dress the liquidity issue by pump-ing in more money into the system by open market purchase of bonds.
• Apart from increased consumer spending, government's cash balances with the Reserve Bank of India have also increased, which means the government is spend-ing less as compared to what it did during the first half of the financial year, and so there is lesser cash coming into the system.
• Foreign investors are also pulling out the country and investing in lesser risky assets with the US Fed forecast to be on course for a rate hike in December.

India for protection of poor farmers' interests at Nairobi WTO meet

• India, at the forth-coming Nairobi meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), will put “all its energies” on pushing through a plan meant to protect the interests and livelihood of poor and vulnerable farmers.

• Roberto Azevedo, WTO Director General, recently said that the negotiations to firm up rules to liberalise global trade are currently “stuck” due to member countries finding it “difficult to reconcile their views” on a host of issues.

• The Indian position echoed the one recently proposed by the G-33 on an effectiveSpecial Safeguard Mechanism (SSM). The G33 is a coalition of 48 nations including India, Indonesia and China, which took up the issue of develop-ing countries getting considerable flexibility in limiting market opening of agriculture sector.

• The SSM is a trade remedy that would allow developing countries to temporarily hikeimport duties on farm products to counter sudden import surges and price falls, thereby, protecting the interests of poor farmers.

• The same issue had led to the breakdown of a WTO ministerial meeting in July 2008. It has been generally agreed that the developing countries could have an SSM, but developed countries including the US have opposed a proposal to enable developing countries to raise tariffs (using SSM) over and above the duty commitments made by them (developing countries) in the farm sector during the earlier Uruguay Round of WTO global trade pact negotiations.

Centre to map country's training infrastructure

• The government, in a bid to bolster the impact of the Skill India mission, is mapping the country's exist-ing training infrastructure, including thousands of private training institutes that are thriving but do not reflect in the official data.

• New enterprise- and household-level statistical surveys to be conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) would now glean details about train-ing institutions, their capacities for imparting different skill sets and their utilisation by young job market aspirants.

• The government runs about 12,000 industrial train-ing institutes and has direct access to data on their operations and outcomes, but that information is inadequate to assess the actual training capacity in the country.

• Skill development capacities created through government funded programmes is only a part of the story. Thecapacity created by private in-vestment is unknown.

• The NSDA, an arm of the skill development and entrepreneurship ministry, had re-quested the NSSO under the statistics ministry to incorporate new questions to capture these details into their house-hold and enterprise surveys.

SPORTS

Sindhu seizes title for the third time

• Two-time defending champion P.V. Sindhu completed a hat-trick of women's singles title at the $120,000 Macau Open Grand Prix Gold after defeating Japan's MinatsuMi-tani in the final on Sunday.
• Sindhu produced a dominating game to notch up a 21-9, 21-23, 21-14 win over sixth seed Mitani in a women's singles match that lasted an hour and six minutes.
• The World No. 12 Indian dished out some superb strokes and acute angled returns to bamboozle the Japanese, be-sides making some sound judgements at the baseline to get across Mitani, who struggled to keep the shuttle inside the court.
• Sindhu dominated the proceedings right from the start as she rode on the errors of Mitani to reach 11-5 at the break.
• Mitani came up with an aggressive rally and sealed it with a down the line smash but she failed to curb her errors and most of her returns went wide and long to allow Sindhu lead 17-6 in a jify.

Fury becomes new world heavyweight champion

• Britain's Tyson Fury was crowned the new world heavy-weight champion on Saturday after a unanimous points win over WladimirKlitschko, who sufered his first defeat in elev-en years.
• The 27-year-old Fury was awarded the fight in Duessel-dorf 115-112, 115-112 and 116-111 by the judges to take Klitschko's WBA, IBF, IBO and WBO belts as the Ukrainian sufered his first defeat since 2004.
• Fury will cash in on the vic-tory regardless of the fight purse having bet £200,000 ($300,630) on himself.
• Fury had problems with ill-fitting gloves in the week leading up to the fight, there was plenty of tension in the build-up on Saturday.

First Day-Night test match goes to Australia

• Australia on Sunday claimed a thrilling three-wicket victory inside three days over New Zealand at the Adelaide Oval in the first-ever day-night Test.
• Shaun Marsh took Australia to the cusp of victory before los-ing his wicket on 49 and the fighting Kiwis set up a tense fin-ish under lights by also dismis-sing Peter Nevill to leave the home side seven wickets down.
• Peter Siddle hit the winning runs, much to the relief of the crowd, to clinch a 2-0 series win over the gallant Black Caps. Australia won the first Bris-bane Test by 208 runs and the second Perth Test was drawn.

  This Current Affairs is Part of Online Course of IBPS Exams.. Register Here

  Click Here for Daily News Archive