Current Affairs for BANK, IBPS Exams - 12 July 2022

::National::

NCW launches awareness programmes on NRI marriages

The National Commission for Women (NCW) launched a series of awareness programmes on possible risks involved in NRI marriages. The ‘Awareness Programmes on NRI Marriages: Dos and Don’ts, A Way Forward’ is aimed at creating awareness among victims around available preventive measures and legal remedies.
“These programmes aim to familiarise victims of NRI marriages of their rights, deliberate upon the challenges faced by aggrieved women in getting substantial relief through remedies available under Indian legal system and to seek possible solutions to effectively reduce them,” the union ministry of women and child development said in a statement.
NCW held a multi-ministerial meeting to discover ways to protect married women deserted abroad. It was noted that a national helpline number, training police officers in dealing with these cases and making women aware of their legal rights are some ways the issue can be tackled.
The programmes were held in four technical sessions, namely, role of judiciary in providing relief to women aggrieved in NRI marriages, role of police, role of legal machinery and sociological aspects of NRI marriages.
NCW chairperson Rekha Sharma pointed out the importance of girl education and providing equal opportunities. “These awareness programmes will be successful only if families and societies change their mindset. It is our collective responsibility to uproot this evil. NCW is committed to raising awareness across the state and we request you to join hands with us,” Sharma added.

Printed Study Materials for IBPS, SBI Bank Exam

::International::

Indo-Pacific: Experts say Canada must deepen strategic ties with India

Canada should deepen strategic ties with India, as it otherwise risk being excluded from the democratic alignment that has emerged in the Indo-Pacific region, experts in the bilateral space have stressed.
“Canada has already fallen behind its closest allies, the US and Australia, in building a partnership with India. As the Indo-Pacific continues to rise in importance, it is in the Canadian interest to define a leading role for itself with India towards a more secure and prosperous world,” new commentary published by the Ottawa-based think tank MacDonald Laurier Institute (MLI), and also featured in the Canadian daily National Post, said.
The opinion, posted, came from the head of MLI’s Foreign Policy & National Security ProgrammeShuvaloyMajumdar and senior fellow at India’s Observer Research Foundation Sameer Patil.
The”bad news”, they noted, was that as US President Joe Biden and other leaders were “working to improve western cooperation with India, Canada is entirely missing in action”.
Canada’s security interests in the region, “one would think that Ottawa would bring ambition to this growing relationship between India and the West”. But whether it pertained to security of the Quad, comprising India, the US, Australia and Japan, or AUKUS, the Australia, US and United Kingdom groups, negotiations for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), launched this March, or cooperation with Pacific island states, “Canada has simply been left out of the conversation”, they said.
They added, “With its advanced defence industry and leading innovation ecosystem, Canada has a lot to offer India and the Indo-Pacific in building the 21st century defence industry base.”
The Russian attack on Ukraine “serves as a reminder that democracies ought to assess Indo-Pacific security more seriously, in what might be considered Nato’s Pacific flank. The West need not wait for similar crises to erupt to start building security cooperation with Asian democracies, particularly India and Japan”, they argued.
When the prime ministers of the two countries met in person on the margins of the G7 summit last month in Germany, it was their first such meeting in over four years. A readout of that encounter from the Canadian prime minister’s office said they discussed, among other issues, “cooperation” in the “free, open, and inclusive Indo-Pacific region”.

::Economy::

Centre should privatise all PSBs, except State Bank of India: NCAER

The Centre should privatise all public sector banks (PSBs), except the State Bank of India (SBI). This is because private banks have emerged as a credible alternative to PSBs with substantial market share.
Also, government ownership hinders the ability of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to regulate the sector, according to a report by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER).
Barring SBI, most other PSBs have lagged behind private banks in all the major indicators of performance during the last decade. They have seen soured loans and operational costs soar, the report authored by NCAER’s Poonam Gupta and economist ArvindPanagariya said.
These PSBs have also attained lower returns on assets and equity than their private sector counterparts.
PSBs have lost ground to private banks, both in terms of deposits and advances of loans. Since 2014-15, almost the entire growth of the banking sector is attributable to the private banks and the SBI, it said.“The under-performance of PSBs has persisted despite a number of policy initiatives aimed at bolstering their performance during this period.
These initiatives are recapitalisation, constitution of the Bank Board Bureau to streamline and professionalise hiring and governance practices; prompt corrective action plans; and consolidation through mergers, which helped reduce their number from 27 in 2016-17 to 12 currently,” the report said.
The non-performing assets (NPA) of PSBs remain elevated as compared to private banks even as the government infused $65.67 billion into PSBs between 2010-11 and 2020-21 to help them tide over the bad loan crisis.

NBFCs, HFCs securitisation volume doubled to Rs 33k cr in April-Jun: Report

Securitisation volumes originated by Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFC)s and Housing Finance Companies (HFC)s have almost doubled to around Rs 33,000 crore in the first quarter of the current financial year, a report.
The volume of such transactions is expected to cross Rs 1.5 lakh crore in FY23, Icra Ratings said in a report.
The growth in volumes reflects a 1.9 times increase when compared to Rs 17,200 crore of securitised assets in Q1 FY22 and a 4.4 times increase compared to Rs 7,500 crore in Q1 FY2021, the report said.
"The securitisation volumes witnessed in Q1 FY23 were almost double the volumes seen in Q1 FY2022. With the growth in credit demand, the disbursements picked up for NBFCs and HFCs in Q4 FY22 and have remained buoyant in Q1 FY23, thereby resulting in higher funding requirements which have been partly met through the securitisation of their retail loans," the agency's Vice President and Group Head (structured finance ratings) AbhishekDafria said.
Securitisation is the financial practice of pooling various types of contractual debt such as residential mortgages, commercial mortgages, auto loans or credit card debt obligations (or other non-debt assets which generate receivables) and selling their related cash flows to third party investors as securities, which may be described as bonds, pass-through securities, or Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs).
The securitisation market is primarily intended to redistribute the credit risk away from the originators to a wide spectrum of investors who can bear the risk, thus aiding financial stability and providing an additional source of funding.

::Science and tech::

Why deepest-ever infrared image of distant universe is iconic, NASA explains

It’s out now. A slice of the vast universe captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in “the deepest, and the sharpest infrared view to date”. US president Joe Biden unveiled the image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 - Webb’s First Deep Field - on Monday (local time) at a White House event. Thousands of galaxies are revealed in a tiny sliver of the vast universe in the image, says the US space agency.
Why is it iconic? Here are more details:
1. The image shows the galaxy cluster - SMACS 0723 - as it was 4.6 billion years ago. “The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it.,” says NASA.
2. With the world's largest and most powerful telescope seeking the earliest galaxies, a path is set for the researchers to learn more about their masses, ages, histories, and compositions.
3. “The first image from the Webb Space Telescope represents a historic moment for science and technology. For astronomy and space exploration. And for America and all humanity,” said Biden in a tweet after revealing the image.
4. “These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and remind the American people – especially our children – that there’s nothing beyond our capacity. We can see possibilities no one has ever seen before. We can go places no one has ever gone before,” he added.
5. The highest-resolution images of the infrared universe ever captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) brings into focus never-seen-before tiny, faint structures, including star clusters and diffuse features.
6. "Webb's First Deep Field is not only the first full-color image from the James Webb Space Telescope, it’s the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe, so far. This image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. It’s just a tiny sliver of the vast universe," said NASA administrator Bill Nelson. “This mission was made possible by human ingenuity – the incredible NASA Webb team and our international partners at the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Webb is just the start of what we can accomplish in the future when we work together for the benefit of humanity."

::Sports::

Roger Federer sinks to all-time career low after missing Wimbledon 2022

His prolonged struggle with knee injury saw Roger Federer miss the Wimbledon Championships for the very first time in his career. He had won the Junior title in 1998 and made his men's singles main draw debut at the Wimbledon the following year and has since continued his annual visit to the All England Club where he won an Open Era record of eight of his 20 Grand Slam titles. However, after missing the 2022 Wimbledon tournament Federer sank to an all-time low in his career.
It was at the SW19 that Federer had last made his official appearance in a tennis match. He had lost to Hubert Hurkacz in the quarterfinal in straight sets. Following the heartbreaking loss, Federer underwent a knee treatment that kept him away from ATP tour for exactly a year.
On Monday, ATP released the fresh rankings update and Federer, for the first time in his career, dropped outside the top 1000.