Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 10 April 2016

:: NATIONAL ::

NIT Srinagar's student's demand of moving NIT out is not accepted by Govt

Amid protests by the outstation students at the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Govt said that there was no plan to move the institution out of the State as demanded by a section of the students.
M.J. Zarabi, Chairman of Board of Governors of the NIT said that the exams would be held as per the schedule from April 11.
The other demands of the students — action against NIT workers “who had sided with anti-national students” and the policemen who resorted to the baton charge — would be considered after the State inquiry was completed.
An email would be provided to students for redress of complaints against the teaching staff.
Tension at the NIT — fuelled by the clashes between local and outstation students over the West Indies-India cricket match and the police action
Hours after BJP national secretary R.P. Singh called a ‘Chalo NIT’ march to express solidarity with the non-local students, the JKLF called a shutdown for Tuesday.

Modernisations of ports is focus of the government

The Centre will sanction contracts worth Rs.60,000 crore to modernise ports by May 26, Road Transport, Highways and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari said.
Modernisation, mechanisation and computerisation of the ports will be undertaken. Since the NDA came to power two years ago, investment worth Rs.83,361 crore had come to the port sector.
The ‘Sagarmala’ project, aimed at promoting port-led development along India’s 7,500 km coast, has been finalised with the views of all stakeholders present at the meeting.
The government was hopeful of investments worth Rs.4 lakh crore and one crore jobs under the project.
The capacity of 12 major ports increased by 4.3 per cent, when global trade had gone up by just 0.5 per cent.
The improvement in efficiency in ports has lowered the logistics costs leading to a benefit of Rs.400-500 crore to the Indian trade. But compared with China and European countries, the logistics costs in India were higher.

Govt says all UP villages will be electrified before 2019

Over 1,300 villages in Uttar Pradesh have been electrified under the rural electrification programme since the BJP-led NDA came to power at the Centre two years ago.
Govt aimed to provide electricity to each and every household in the State before 2019.
Mr. Goyal said after becoming the Power Minister, he “was surprised to find the status of rural electrification in Uttar Pradesh wherein only three villages were electrified during 2012-2014.”
The Centre had sanctioned the highest amount, Rs. 6,946 crore, to the State government under the Deen Dayal Upadhayaya Gram Jyoti Yojna and Rs. 5,651 crore under the Integrated Power Development Scheme.
Under the Centre’s Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY), U.P. would benefit by Rs. 33,000 crore in the coming years. In January, U.P. became the fourth State, and the first non-NDA ruled, to formally join UDAY.
The State government has also promised to ensure electrification of one lakh villages and hamlets in U.P. by July 2016.
The government has asked officials to make sure that the drought-hit Bundelkhand region gets at least 20 hours of electricity every day.
U.P. had become the fastest State to replace one crore “bulbs with energy-efficient LEDs,” distributed under the Unnat Jyoti by Affordable LEDs for All (UJALA) programme.
The price of LED bulb had dropped to Rs. 80 in U.P. due to the “transparent procurement by EESL and the removal of VAT” in the State.

:: International ::

Colombo port city project will develop into a financial hub

The Colombo Port City project, which both China and Sri Lanka have decided to develop into a financial hub, will not have any impact on Indian security, visiting Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said.
“We have discussed it with India and we are willing to discuss it with India further. As you know, this is not going to be a China-Sri Lanka venture. It is going to open to everyone and already many Indian businessmen have told me that they are willing to come to the port city,” Mr. Wickremesinghe said.
Sri Lanka has been planning to establish a financial and business hub in the Indian Ocean and we selected the port city to be the location. So from a landfill and real estate [project], it has become a financial hub.
The Port City would become part of efforts to turn Sri Lanka’s western province into a mega-polis of eight million people.
The Prime Minister highlighted that his government wanted to turn the port of Hambantota into another Shenzhen— the city that was at the heart of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.
He rejected the contention that like Gwadar in Pakistan, the Chinese will manage the operations of the port.
Sri Lankans were talking to Andhra Pradesh about greater cooperation between Sri Lankan ports and Visakhapatnam once an economic and technology agreement with India is materialised.
Mr. Wickremesinghe said during his visit “a comprehensive economic strategy” between Sri Lanka and China had been defined, which would be relevant for the next two decades.
The Prime Minister pointed out that with China as one of the core partners, his country had devised a regionally inclusive “economic plan”, which would establish Sri Lanka as a “financial, business and logistics hub”.

US wants Taliban to engage with Afghanistan

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called on the Taliban to re-enter peace talks with Kabul during an unannounced visit on Saturday to show his support for Afghanistan’s unity government, which he helped create 18 months ago.
His visit comes as Kabul desperately tries to bring the insurgent group back to the negotiation table to end their conflict which began in 2001.
“We discussed our shared goal of launching peace talks with the Taliban,” he told reporters at a joint press conference with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul.

:: Science and Technology ::

Expandable habitat on the ISS

For the first time, the International Space Station (ISS) will be equipped with an expandable habitable structure that has the potential to revolutionise work on the orbital laboratory.
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, launched on a Falcon 9 rocket, is delivering almost 3,175kg of cargo, including the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), to the ISS.
BEAM will arrive in Dragon’s unpressurised trunk and, after about five days, will be removed and attached to the station. Expansion is targeted for the end of May.
Expandable habitats are designed to take up less room on a rocket, but provide greater volume once expanded.
This first in situ test of the module will allow researchers to gauge how well the habitat protects against solar radiation, space debris and contamination.
BEAM is a 21st-century reincarnation of NASA’s TransHab, which never got beyond blueprints and ground mock-ups in the 1990s.

A new state of matter detected

An international team of scientists has successfully detected a mysterious new state of matter that causes electrons, thought to be nature’s indivisible building blocks, to break into pieces.
The state, known as a quantum spin liquid, was found in a two-dimensional material with a structure similar to graphene.
First predicted 40 years ago, quantum spin liquids were thought to be hiding in certain magnetic materials, but had not been conclusively sighted in nature.
In a typical magnetic material, electrons each behave like tiny bar magnets. When a material is cooled to a low enough temperature, they will order themselves so that all the north magnetic poles point in the same direction.
But in a material containing a spin liquid state, even if cooled to absolute zero, the bar magnets would not align but form an entangled soup .
The researchers used neutron scattering techniques to look for experimental evidence of fractionalisation in crystals of ruthenium chloride (RuCl3) to measure the first signatures of fractional particles known as Majorana fermions.

:: India and World ::

The birth anniversary of the father of Indian constitution will be observed in UN

The birth anniversary of B.R. Ambedkar, father of the Indian Constitution, will be observed on April 13 at the United Nations for the first time with focus on combating inequalities to achieve Sustainable Development Goals.
The Permanent Mission of India to the U.N., in association with the Kalpana Saroj Foundation and Foundation For Human Horizon, will commemorate Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary at the U.N. headquarters, a day before his date of birth.
The landmark 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognises that combating inequality within and among countries, creating sustained, inclusive and sustainable growth and fostering inclusion are interdependent.
The vision of Dr. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution, to achieve social justice and equality also finds resonance in the core message of the 2030 Agenda.
On the occasion, a panel discussion will be organised on the topic “Combating inequalities for the achievement of SDGs” with the objective of raising awareness of the importance of addressing all forms of inequality for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
United Nations Development Group Chair and Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme Helen Clark will deliver the keynote speech.

:: Business and Economy ::

India thinks UK's new guidelines on ICTs are inconsistent with WTO agreement

India has told Britain that by tightening norms for skilled foreign workers it was mixing up Intra Company Transfers (ICTs) with immigration and this could affect bilateral ties.
The commerce ministry will seek legal advice on whether the new guidelines on ICTs discriminate against India and are inconsistent with the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services.
The move comes amid concerns by Indian tech firms which are worried that the tighter norms for foreign skilled workers would chip away at their bottom line.
The Indian IT/ITeS sector is mainly affected by the stipulation that from April 2017 onwards a company (including India-based), looking to bring a worker into the U.K. for short duration, specifically to carry out the work of another organisation, will have to pay them a minimum annual salary of £41,500.
This minimum threshold represents a 67 per cent increase from the extant limit of £24,800.
Industry believes that these impacts will not achieve either of the government’s aims of a decrease in migration or an increase in U.K. skilled workers but negatively impact overall UK productivity.
It was found that Indian IT workers account for over 90 per cent of migrants in the category known as “ICTs for third-party contracting”.
Noting that skilled migrant workers have helped in boosting its economy and reducing the costs of companies, Britain, however, said the skilled worker visa “reforms” were taken to safeguard employment opportunities for its residents as well as to bring down the reliance of the U.K. enterprises on skilled labour from other countries.
The new norms also state that from autumn 2016, all intra-company transferees will be required to pay the Immigration Health Surcharge.
The U.K. will review the extent to which allowances may be counted as salary to ensure it has appropriate safeguards in place against undercutting of the resident labour market.
However, to provide flexibility, the minimum salary threshold for intra-company transferees working in the U.K. for between five and nine years has been reduced from £155,300 to £120,000.

Unified Payments Interface digital wallet to be unveilled soon

Having different digital wallets for different e-commerce sites could well be a thing of the past. Now, you can have only one wallet, which is essentially your bank account, from where all payments could be made for any transactions.
It does not need the entry of bank account details and 11-character Indian Financial System (IFSC) code in every time transaction. All you need is an e-mail like Unified Payments Interface (UPI) address.
In UPI, money transfer is possible in both send mode and collect mode. The present system of mobile payments offers only send mode.
You can send money. But, one cannot pull the money from another account. Of course, approval from the person whose account will be debited, will be required to complete the transaction.
A merchant or an individual can send a request to the UPI user for money which will be transferred after the user’s approval. The difference with the present system is that, the person who is sending is not initiating the action.
Also, one does not need to add any beneficiary account, unlike while transferring money through Internet banking. There is a limit of Rs.1 lakh per transaction through the UPI platform.
One need not give a bank account number or any code to do a transaction. “Only using the virtual address of UPI, one can send money or allow someone to pull money. The individual can either choose a static pin or a one time password to carry out transactions.
But the real game changer is that this would end the need to have different wallets for different e-commerce sites. Complete interoperability is what the UPI platform aims to achieve.
There are about 35-36 wallets in the payments system, which the banking regulator has approved.

PMO wants govt to rely on Aadhaar for schemes

The government has decided to stop issuing new smart cards to beneficiaries of government schemes as Aadhaar is now backed by a law
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has issued strict instructions to the Information Technology Ministry to ensure that States and the Central governmentstop issuing smart cards for new programmes for beneficiaries, and to rely on the Aadhaar-based Direct Benefit Transfer platform instead.
The move will impact ministries such as Labour, Social Justice and Health, which are in the process or have already rolled out smart cards.
The government had said earlier that over 100 crore people, constituting 93 per cent of the adult population, had a unique identification (UID) number under the Aadhaar platform.
Last month, Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment had announced that all differently abled persons would soon get a unique identity card to avail welfare schemes. .
State governments had also planned to use smart card technology for welfare schemes. For instance, Odisha was mulling smart cards for construction workers in the State.
The PMO sent a separate communiqué to Labour Secretary Shankar Aggarwal in the context of a proposal to issue 40 crore smart cards to informal sector workers, called the Unorganised Workers’ Identification Number (U-WIN).
The UWIN cards were to be used by these workers to access benefits under schemes such as Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana , Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana , Atal Pension Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana and Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana.
The PMO rejected the proposal noting that Aadhaar would act as a “universal unique identifier for each citizen.”
A UWIN number would not only duplicate work, but also introduce further problems in linking up with other databases which have already been linked with Aadhaar.
Smart cards work using cryptography, which is more fool-proof than biometrics. Biometrics allow for remote, covert and non-consensual identification.
Smart card vendors, however, said the move may not impact their market.