Current Affairs for BANK, IBPS Exams - 02 May 2022

::National::

TN health minister suspends college dean for altering MBBS students’ oath

The dean of Tamil Nadu-government run Madurai Medical College was removed from his post and put on a waitlist on Sunday after first-year MBBS students of the college were administered ‘Maharshi Charak Shapath’ in Sanskrit instead of the conventional Hippocratic Oath in English.
“This is a highly reprehensible act (administering Charak oath),” said a statement from the state’s health minister Ma Subramanian, who ordered the action against the dean, Dr A Rathinavel.
“The Hippocratic Oath has been followed from time immemorial by all government medical colleges and hospitals for new entrants in Tamil Nadu and for students pursuing medical training after completing their medical education,” the order read.
“As Charak oath was given instead of the Hippocratic Oath, Dr A Rathinavel, dean, Madurai Medical College, has been relieved of his post and placed on a waiting list,” the statement said.
The state government has also initiated a departmental enquiry under director of medical education, Narayana Babu, to look into the incident. All deans of the state’s medical colleges have also been instructed to not deviate from protocol and stick to the Hippocratic Oath, the statement added.
State ministers PTR Palanivel Thiaga Rajan (finance) and P Moorthy (commercial taxes) were on the dais during the college’s induction ceremony held on Saturday for students to don their white aprons for the first time. Both ministers had expressed shock over the change in protocol.
Former Union health minister and leader of the Pattali Makkal Katchi (an NDA ally) Anbumani Ramadoss expressed shock over the incident particularly because it happened in front of the ministers. He tweeted that the Hippocratic Oath teaches medical practitioners to give hope to their patients and it stresses on possessing qualities like affection, honesty, and being merciful.

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::International::

Russia says want to 'prevent nuclear war', then an ultrasonic weapons warning

Russia is not ready to relent just yet to the pressure from the West on ending the Ukraine war, and the latest remarks from the country’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday made it clear. Moscow has developed ‘ultrasonic weapons’ to counter a possible attack from the West, he was quoted as saying by news agency Reuters while he simultaneously downplayed the threat of a nuclear war.
"The western media misrepresent the Russian threats. Russia has never interrupted efforts to reach agreements that guarantee that a nuclear war never develops," the 72-year-old minister insisted, stressing that Moscow was working to “prevent a nuclear war”. Meanwhile, in the war-hit country, a partial evacuation was carried out from the Mariupol steel plant where a large number of civilians were stuck amid the Kremlin’s assault.
In his latest nightly address, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy alleged Moscow was waging “a war of extermination”. He said that Russian shelling had hit food, grain and fertilizer warehouses, and residential neighborhoods in the Kharkiv, Donbas and other regions, news agency AP reported. “The targets they choose prove once again that the war against Ukraine is a war of extermination for the Russian army. What could be Russia’s strategic success in this war? Honestly, I do not know,” Zelensky was quoted as saying.
Russia’s Lavrov, meanwhile, said that country “only wanted to guarantee the security of pro-Russians in the east”. As a part of “long-standing anti-Russian strategy”, he alleged, the US had formented the Ukrainian hostility.
On Sunday, after a long spell of fears over civilian safety, evacuations began from the Azovstal steel plant in the port city of Mariupol. “Evacuation of civilians from Azovstal began. The 1st group of about 100 people is already heading to the controlled area. Tomorrow we’ll meet them in Zaporizhzhia. Grateful to our team! Now they, together with #UN, are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant. (sic),” Zelensky tweeted.
Later, however, according to officials, the Russian shelling resumed, which yet again interrupted the evacuation efforts.
While several other parts of Ukraine continue to see violence, an explosive damaged a railway bridge Sunday in the Kursk region of Russia, which borders Ukraine, and a criminal investigation has been started, according to an AP report.

::Economy::

PhonePe says Northeast region took lead in digital transactions in Q1

Digital payment platform PhonePe on Saturday said that the northeastern region has been a big driver of the growth in the company's digital transactions in the first quarter of 2022.A
Assam witnessed the fastest adoption with over 2.5 lakh merchants in 2022 compared to just 10,000 merchants in 2020, followed by Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Mizoram.
These insights were a part of the PhonePe Pulse Q1 data.
"As predicted in our fourth-quarter PhonePe Pulse report, we continued to see a surge in volumes in the first quarter of 2022 across various use cases further cementing the fundamental shift in consumer behaviour towards contactless payments," KarthikRaghupathy, Head of Strategy and Investor Relations at PhonePe, said in a statement.
The PhonePe Pulse trends also revealed that the first quarter of the year saw a spike in the peer-to-peer transaction (P2P) and person to merchant (P2M) transactions, and strong growth in both payment volumes as well as the number of registered users.

Non-food bank credit grew 9.7% in March, personal loans rose 12.4%: RBI

Non-food bank credit grew 9.7 per cent in March 2022 as compared to a rise of 4.5 per cent reported a year ago, according to RBI.
Loans to agriculture and allied activities continued to perform well, registering a growth of 9.9 per cent in the reporting month. It was 10.5 per cent in the year-ago period, according to the RBI's Sectoral Deployment of Bank Credit March 2022 data released on Friday.
Growth in credit to industry picked up to 7.1 per cent in March 2022 from a contraction of 0.4 per cent in March 2021. Size-wise, credit to medium industries registered a robust growth of 71.4 per cent in March 2022, which was 34.5 per cent last year.
Loan growth to micro and small industries accelerated to 21.5 per cent from 3.9 per cent and credit to large industries recorded a marginal growth of 0.9 per cent against a contraction of 2.5 per cent during the same period last year.
Growth in the credit to services sector accelerated to 8.9 per cent in the reporting month as compared to 3 per cent in the year-ago period, mainly due to significant improvement in credit growth to NBFCs (Non-Banking Financial Companies) and robust credit offtake in trade and transport operators.

::Science and tech::

In 50 years, increased risks of viruses spread by mammals, and several pandemics

The rising temperatures and rapid climate change across the globe is likely to drive 15,000 new instances of viruses being transmitted from mammals to mammals by 2070, a study published by Nature journal has predicted. This will increase the risk of new viruses infecting humans manifold, leaving room for several pandemics in the coming future, the study warned.
Several researchers have attributed the Covid-19 virus to the zoonotic transmission - passing of a previously unknown virus (Coronavirus in this case) from a wild animal to a human.
The study's co-author Colin Carlson, a global change biologist also at Georgetown, said climate change is "creating innumerable hotspots of future zoonotic risk - or present day zoonotic risk - right in our backyard. We have to acknowledge that climate change is going to be the biggest upstream driver of disease emergence, and we have to build health systems that are ready for that."
As the temperature rises, several animal species will abandon their native places and move to cooler land where they will meet several other new species for the first time. This will give rise to virus-transmission among mammals, the study says.
A rise in viruses jumping between species will trigger more outbreaks like the Covid-19 pandemic, posing a serious threat to human and animal health alike, the study warns.
The hotspots of virus-jumping will be regions with species-rich ecosystems (particularly areas of Africa and Asia) and areas that are densely populated by humans - India and Indonesia.
The transfer of viruses and pathogens from animals to humans will take place in densely populated regions of the world.
This process has likely already begun, and will continue even if the world acts quickly to reduce carbon emissions and poses a major threat to both animals and humans, the researchers said.
Thought to be part of the origins of Covid-19, bats are believed to be reservoirs of viruses and will go through virus transmission regardless of climate change.

::Sports::

Carolina Marin shows the heart of a champion, wins European title on return

As Kirsty Gilmour’s tap hit the net, Carolina Marin roared in celebration and sank to the court. All the pain, angst and frustration of a year seemed to melt away in tears. Wearing a shirt with the slogan ‘Vamos Carolina’, Marin’s mother, with her eyes moist, clapped from the packed stands at Gallus Municipal Centre in Madrid as the fans rose to celebrate the home girl’s record sixth European badminton title on Saturday.
The title apart, it was more heartening to see Marin, 28, the three-time world champion and 2016 Rio Olympics gold medallist, back to her feet and make another gritty comeback from injury; gliding, lunging and smashing through the week to let the badminton world know she was back.