Current Affairs for BANK, IBPS Exams

19 March 2016

:: NATIONAL::

Punjab House passes resolution against SYL

• Day after the Supreme Court ordered status quo on land meant for the Sutlej-Yamuna Link Canal, the Punjab Assembly on Friday unanimously adopted a resolution, moved by Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, declaring that “the canal will not be allowed to be constructed at any cost and under any circumstances.”

Photos of CMs, Ministers in public ads allowed

• In a major relief to various States including poll-bound West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Assam, the Supreme Court on Friday modified its earlier order and allowed photographs of Chief Ministers, Governors and Ministers to be carried in public advertisements.

• The court, in its verdict last year, had held that only the President, the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice of India could feature in government advertisements.

• The decision was later challenged by the Centre and seven States. “The exception carved out in paragraph 23 of the judgment dated May 13, 2015 permitting publication of the photographs of the President, the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice of the country, subject to the said authorities themselves deciding the question, is now extended to the Governors and the Chief Ministers of the States

Interest rates on small-saving rates slashed

• The government slashed interest rates on small-saving schemes, including the Public Provident Fund and Kisan Vikas Patra.

• The decision that will hit small savers is aimed at aligning these administered interest rates closer to the market rates. The new rates will come into effect on April 1 and will be valid till June 30. After the decision taken last month to revise the interest rates on small savings every quarter, the interest rate under the Public Provident Fund scheme will be cut to 8.1 per cent for the period from April 1 to June 30, from 8.7 per cent at present

• While the interest rate on the KVP will be cut to 7.8 per cent from 8.7 per cent, that on post office savings is retained at 4 per cent. The rates on term deposits of durations varying from one to five years have been cut.

• The five-year National Savings Certificates will earn interest at the rate of 8.1 per cent as against 8.5 per cent now. A five-year Monthly Income Account will fetch 7.8 per cent as opposed to 8.4 per cent now. The girl-child saving scheme, Sukanya Samriddhi Account, will have an interest rate of 8.6 per cent as against 9.2 per cent. The senior citizen savings scheme of five years will earn 8.6 per cent compared with 9.3 per cent.

• The rate for the five-year time deposit is being reduced to 7.9 per cent from 8.5 per cent. For five-year recurring deposits, the rate has been slashed to 7.4 per cent from 8.4 per cent.

• The rates on the post office term deposits are being cut from 8.4 per cent to 7.1 per cent for one-year time deposits, 7.2 per cent for two-year time deposits and 7.4 per cent for three-year time deposits.

India presses on beef-free pork import

• Buoyed by its victory at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last year against India’s poultry import ban, the U.S. has now trained its guns on the country’s pork import regulations — which include a condition that such consignments must be beef-free.

• During recent bilateral discussions, India made it clear to the U.S. that the requirement – that pork import consignments must be beef-free — cannot be done away with due to apprehensions of such a move “hurting religious sentiments and provoking riots,” official sources told The Hindu on the condition of anonymity.

• Pigs are usually fed with food ingredients of animal origin to meet their protein requirements. Such animal feeds — including meat/bone/blood meal and hydrolysed intestinal tissues — are among the most cost-effective methods to hike protein levels in the diet of animals such as pigs. However, many Indian States prevent cow slaughter. Also, beef ban, in states such as Maharashtra, had recently become controversial and the BJP had turned beef into a major political issue.

• The requirement of a veterinary certificate stating among other things that “the consignment(s) of processed and unprocessed pork and pork products destined to India do not contain beef and beef products in any form” will not be removed

• US claims the condition is not based on a scientific risk assessment and the concerned international standard (World Organisation for Animal Health). However, citing the example of Australia fulfilling all the pork import norms of India to increase their exports of the item, the Indian authorities have asked the US to do the same

• the U.S. has restrictions on import of Indian dairy items on fears of foot-and-mouth disease. Pointing out that all dairy product exports from India are tested to ensure quality, the sources said India will shortly take up bilaterally the issue of U.S. restrictions on these items.

• On its part, the U.S. had strengthened its animal feed norms to prevent the spread of diseases such as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or the mad cow disease that is transmitted to humans).

• Following the detection of some cases of BSE, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had tightened animal feed norms in 1997 and in 2008. It had prohibited “the use of high-risk cattle material (including those derived from BSE-positive cattle) in feed for all animal species.

• The U.S. has won cases against India at the WTO, including in the ones related to its poultry import ban and the domestic content requirement in its solar power programme.

Madame Tussauds wax museum in Delhi in 2017

• Madame Tussauds, the hugely popular waxworks attraction headquartered here, is planning to open a branch in New Delhi to coincide with the 70{+t}{+h}year of India’s independence in 2017.

• The attraction, which has recently decided to add Prime Minister Narendra Modi to its collection of wax celebrities, will spend £50 million in the next 10 years on India

• Tussauds houses 20 such attractions across the world, all different from each other as they are tailored to the local market for a “host city vibe.

• A wax figure takes four months to create and costs £1,50,000 each. Four wax images of Mr. Modi have been created which are to be installed in London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok.

For granting bail, court applies ‘principle of parity’

• A sessions court in New Delhi, while granting interim bail for six months to JNU students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, applied the “principle of parity” with co-accused and JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who was earlier released on interim bail by the Delhi High Court.

• Umar and Anirban were arrested on sedition charges in connection with a controversial event organised on the university campus on February 9.

Experts unsure if El Nino will fade away

• good number of meteorologists expect the monsoon in 2016 to be normal, though they are unclear whether the El Nino — a weather anomaly blamed for back-to-back droughts over India since 2014 — will completely fade away during the crucial rain months from June to September.

• El Nino refers to an anomalous heating up of the waters in the central-eastern regions of the equatorial Pacific and implies a consistent, average rise in temperature of 0.5 degree Celsius above normal. Historically that translates to the monsoon drying up over India six in 10 years.

• Conversely, the La Nina, or an anti-El Nino, when waters in the same regions dip at least 0.5 degree Celsius and generally considered favourable for the monsoon, is only expected to set in after September

• Nino neutral” conditions were likely to prevail during the crucial months of July and August that accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the monsoon rainfall. “Nino neutral (when sea surface temperatures are close to normal) can be a mixed bag for Indian monsoonbut generally an El Nino year is followed by normal monsoon

OCI cards enough to visit India

• The Indian diaspora will no longer have to get a visa affixed on their passports every time they travel to India as the Union government has decided to do away with the process.

• The government has decided that since the categories Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) and Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) were merged last year, the OCI card will suffice to enter the country and hence would require no visa.

• Till now, every OCI card holder also had to get a visa affixed from the Indian High Commission whenever they planned a visit to India. Now, only the OCI card will be needed

• The government is also planning to make arrangements to print OCI cards at a few big missions such as those in the U.K and the U.S., countries where many Indians reside.

• The government amended the Citizenship Act last year and a notification was issued to merge the two cards.

• Keeping in view the promise [made by PM Modi in the USA and Australia in 2014], an ordinance was promulgated on January 6, 2015 whereby the eligibility and additional benefits of the PIO card have been incorporated in the OCI card and certain other relaxation to OCI card holders have been given by amending the Citizenship Act, 1955. The PIO and the OCI cards used to exist simultaneously, leading to a lot of confusion among the PIOs residing abroad

:: INTERNATIONAL ::

Sir Andrew Wiles wins Abel Prize

• An Oxford University professor has won a £500,000 prize for cracking a 300-year-old mystery mathematical theorem described as an “epochal moment” for academics.

• Sir Andrew Wiles has been awarded the Abel Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which he published in 1994.

• The 62-year-old will pick up the award and a cheque for six million Norwegian Krone (£495,000) from Crown Prince Haakon of Norway in Oslo in May.

Ballistic missiles test fired by North Korea

• North Korea test-fired two medium-range ballistic missiles, just days after leader Kim Jong-Un promised a series of nuclear warhead tests and missile launches amid surging military tensions.

• Friction on the divided Korean peninsula has deepened since the North carried out its fourth nuclear test on January 6, followed a month later by a long-range rocket launch that was widely seen as a disguised ballistic missile test.

• U.S. defence officials said they had tracked two launches – both believed to be medium-range Rodong missiles fired from road-mobile launch vehicles.

• The Rodong is a scaled-up Scud variant with a maximum range of around 1,300 km.

• They came a day after U.S. President Barack Obama signed an order implementing tough sanctions adopted earlier this month against North Korea by the UN Security Council, as well as fresh unilateral U.S. measures.

Deal to ease migrant crisis

• After months of acrimony, the European Union and Turkey reached a landmark deal to ease the migrant crisis and give Ankara concessions on better EU relations.

• the 28 EU leaders and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu sealed an agreement that will allow thousands of migrants to be sent back to Turkey, while Ankara will see fast-track procedures to get billions in aid to deal with Syrian refugees, unprecedented visa concessions for Turks to come to Europe and a re-energising of its EU membership bid.

:: BUSINESS ::

Tendulkar poverty line backed by Niti Ayog task force

• A panel tasked with devising ways to reduce poverty has backed the controversial `Tendulkar poverty line’, which categorised people earning less than Rs. 33 a day as poor, on the ground that the line is primarily meant to be an indicator for tracking progress in combating extreme poverty

• The report of the Niti Aayog’s Task Force on Eliminating Poverty, which was leaked, argues that the poverty line is not the basis of identification of the poor in India. Instead, it is the BPL Census on the basis of which state governments identify the poor. The latest of these is the Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011.

• A Committee chaired by former Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and the National Statistical Commission, the late Suresh Tendulkar, computed poverty lines for 2004-05 at a level that was equivalent, in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, to one U.S. dollar per person per day, which was the internationally accepted poverty line at that time.

• The PPP model refers to a method used to work out the money that would be needed to purchase the same goods and services in two places. Across countries, this is used to calculate an implicit foreign exchange rate, the PPP rate, at which a given amount of money has the same purchasing power in different countries.

• Based on the Tendulkar panel norms, the Planning Commission had announced that in absolute terms the number of poor stood reduced from 40.7 crore to 35.5 crore during the period 2004-05 to 2009-10 and and 26.9 crore in 2011-12.

• Following criticism of these estimates, the UPA Government had in May 2012 set up the five-member expert group, headed by the then Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council C. Rangarajan, to revisit the way poverty is estimated.

• In the report Dr. Rangarajan suggested that persons spending below Rs 47 a day in cities and and Rs 32 in villages be considered poor.

• The report has also recommended sweeping changes to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) for allowing use of the programme’s funds to pay for labour on private farms.

• Another of its suggestion for eliminating poverty within 5-7 years is modest cash transfers to the poorest five families in every village to be identified by Gram Panchayats

• It has also said that the Aadhaar accounts will give government an “excellent” database to assess the total volume of benefits accruing to each household, “which can pave the way for replacing myriad schemes with consolidated cash transfers, except where there are compelling reasons to continue with in-kind transfers.

Cisco to invest $100 mn by 2020 in India

• Technology giant Cisco said it will invest USD 100 million in India by 2020, to support the Government’s Digital India initiative.

• Of this, USD 40 million will be used to fund early-stage and growth-stage companies in areas such as Internet of Things (IoT), security and smart cities. The company also plans to train 2.50 lakh students in the country.

• Cisco will collaborate closely with State governments in India on strategic initiatives, including addition of six new innovation labs, three centres of expertise, funded university collaborations and skills investments.

• This investment is part of the networking major’s global ‘Country Digitization Acceleration’ or CDA programme, where select countries receive strategic investments to accelerate existing government goals to drive economic growth through high-tech innovation.

MSEI eyes alternative asset classes to turn around exchange

• Singed by the NSEL-FTIL fiasco , Metropolitan Stock Exchange of India (MSEI), the country’s youngest stock exchange, will start implementing from fiscal 2017 a business plan whose cornerstone will be to develop asset classes other than equities.

• MSEI is seeking to raise Rs.105 crore additional capital by July through a mix of equity and debt to fund its growth plans. From being a promoter-driven company, MSEI is now a board-driven company, whose equity is held by eight public sector banks, financial institutions and corporates.

:: SPORTS ::

World’s first Pele shrine in Ukraine

• In the heart of an eastern Ukrainian city shaken by echoes of guns stands the world’s first shrine to football legend Pele that miraculously survived nearly two years of war

• Football’s governing body FIFA recognised Khudobin’s creation as the world’s first museum dedicated to the man widely regarded as the 20th century’s greatest player.

• It opened during Ukraine’s co-hosting of the European Championship in 2012 but has been closed for the past two years owing to conflict between Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists.

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