Current Affairs for BANK, IBPS Exams - 03 April 2021

::NATIONAL::

India's biggest floating solar power plant with a capacity of 100 MW will be set up at Ramagundam in Telangana.
The project expected to be opened in May, is being set up at Ramagundam thermal power plant reservoir. The solar project is commissioned by the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC). The project, which is estimated to cost around 423 crore rupees, will have 4.5 lakh photovoltaic panels.
The solar panels will cover 450-acre area of the reservoir and can be expanded in the future. NTPC's efforts to set up floating solar power projects is aimed at reducing its carbon footprints and accelerate its green energy production to 30 per cent of its capacity.
The world's largest solar power plant with 600 MW capacity is being set up on Omkareshwar Dam on Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh. The project costing 3,000 crore rupees is expected to start power generation only by 2022-23.

Over 15 lakh flowers of more than 64 varieties are in full bloom on the foothills of Zabarwan Mountain in Srinagar.
People will get an opportunity to witness the blooming flowers during a five-dayTulip Festival which gets underway at Srinagar in Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir this afternoon.
Prime Minister NarendraModi praised the beauty of Kashmir in a tweet last week and urged the people to visit the magestic Tulip Festival.
MrModi had also urged the visitors to equally see the warm hospitality of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

South Korea's foreign minister said on Saturday he expects China to play a role in peacemaking between South and North Korea, inviting China's president to visit as the United States and its allies agreed to continue pushing Pyongyang to denuclearise.
"South Korea and China share a common goal toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and toward permanent peacemaking policies," Chung Eui-yong was quoted as saying by South Korean news agency Yonhap.
Chung extended the invitation to President Xi Jinping to visit when Covid-19 stabilises.
Chung met on Saturday with State Councillor Wang Yi, the Chinese government's top diplomat, in the Chinese city of Xiamen, as part of the first visit of a South Korean foreign minister to China since 2017.
Wang said China and South Korea had agreed "to promote the process to politically resolve issues surrounding the Korean Peninsula," Yonhap reported.

Indian Railways has logged highest ever electrification of sections covering over six thousand route kilometer in a single year during 2020-21.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, it has surpassed the previous highest of over five thousand route kilometer achieved in 2018-19. Indian Railways has given a lot of emphasis on electrification in the recent years to reduce the country's dependence on imported petroleum-based energy.
More than five times electrification was achieved in the last seven years as compared to 2007-14. It has also commissioned a record 56 Traction Sub Stations during 2020-21, as against previous best of 42, which shows an improvement of 33 percent. Some of the Major sections electrified by the Indian Railways over the years include Mumbai-Howrah via Jabalpur, Delhi-Darbhanga-Jaynagar and Chennai-Trichy.

The Environment Ministry has amended rules allowing thermal power plants within 10 kilometres of the National Capital Region (NCR) and in cities with more than 10 lakh population to comply with new emission norms by the end of 2022, according to official notification.
A task force will be constituted by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to "categorise thermal power plants (TPPs) in three categories on the basis of their location", the ministry said in the notification dated April 1.
Non-attainment cities are those which have consistently failed to meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The CPCB has identified 124 such cities.
The Environment Ministry had revised emission norms for particulate matter (PM), sulphur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen for TPPs in December 2015, requiring them to install emission control systems by December 2017.

There was a lot of excitement when the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration showed the world the first ever image of a black hole back in April 2019. Weighing in at 6.5 million times the mass of our Sun, this supermassive black hole is located in the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, some 55 million light years away from Earth.
This was the first direct evidence that black holes exist. It also provided an extraordinary test of Einstein’s theory of gravity and its underlying notions of space and time – probing gravity in its most extreme limits. But we still don’t know much about these monsters.
Black holes are perhaps the most enigmatic objects in nature, powering some of the most energetic – and unobservable – phenomena in our universe. Due to their event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape, we cannot see a black hole directly. But matter that falls towards a black hole is drawn in by its immense gravitational pull and becomes extremely hot and luminous.

Sharath Kamal and ManikaBatra make for an exciting mixed doubles table tennis pair for the Tokyo Olympics.
They showed skills and mental toughness to stun Korea’s world No. 5 pair of Lee Sang-su and JeonJi-hee in the final of the qualification tournament in Doha to book their Tokyo Olympics spot.
They showed spark at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, where they won bronze.