Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 10 MAY 2020

::NATIONAL::

India has said that the recently inaugurated road section in Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand lies completely within its territory.
In response to queries on statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Nepal pertaining to the road inauguration, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson AnuragSrivastava said the road follows the pre-existing route used by the pilgrims of the KailashMansarovarYatra.
Under the present project, the same road has been made pliable for the ease and convenience of pilgrims, locals and traders.
The spokesperson said India and Nepal have established mechanism to deal with all boundary matters. He said the boundary delineation exercise with Nepal is ongoing.

National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has issued guidelines for restart of manufacturing industries after the lockdown. In its guidelines, NDMA said state governments will ensure that off- site diaster management plan of the respective major Accidental Hazard units are upto date and preparedness to implement them is high.
It has also advised that all the responsible officers of the district will ensure that the industrial On- Site Disaster Management Plans are also in place and cover Standard Operating Procedures for the safe restarting of the industries during and after COVID -19 lockdown.
In the guidelines, the NDMA has advised the Manufacturing Industries to consider the first week as trial or test run period while restarting the Unit and ensure all safety protocols and not try to achieve high production targets.
In case of discovering a COVID-19 positive case, the factories have to prepare accomodation to isolate workers if needed and HR has to help manage the whole process for individual and all travelling employees also to undergo a mandatory 14 day quarantine.

Maintaining that the combined fiscal deficit of the Centre and states may go up to 13-14 per cent this fiscal, former RBI Governor DuvvuriSubbarao on Sunday said the financial stimulus announced by the Centre on March 26 on account of lockdown to contain spread of COVID-19, is "not sufficient".
Speaking at a webinar titled "The Challenge of the Corona Crisis - Economic Dimensions", organised by the city-based Manthan Foundation, Subbarao said the Centre needs to cap its borrowings as the open ended borrowings will have negative consequences such as pushing interest rates high.
He said that since March 24, when the lockdown was imposed nationwide, millions of households have become vulnerable and therefore livelihood support has to be extended to many more families as most of their savings have dried up.
According to him, the domestic financial sector, which is under deep stress, will be under "deeper stress" by the time the COVID-19 crisis ends, though he sees some silver linings in the situation such as plummeting crude prices and bumper agri yield.
Stressing that the world has to live with coronavirus for some time, Subbarao said both centre and states are working in tandem to contain the pandemic.

Faced with extensive cancellation of global orders due to the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, units in Special Economic Zones (SEZ) want the government to allow them to sell their products in the domestic market without payment of customs duties.
At present, SEZs are also not able to sell their products in the domestic market, as payment of customs duty as per Section 30 of SEZ Act, 2005, is making their products uncompetitive, the Export Promotion Council for EOUs and SEZs (EPCES) said in a letter to commerce and industry minister PiyushGoyal.
As per the council, EPCES sector provides direct employment to more than 25 lakhs people with investment of more than 5.5 lakhs crore and contributesRs 7.87 lakhs crore to India’s export basket.

Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi has approved amendments to the country’s state of emergency that grant him and security agencies additional powers, which the government says are needed to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.
The new amendments allow the President to take measures such as suspending classes at schools and universities and quarantining those returning from abroad. But they also include expanded powers to ban public and private meetings, protests, celebrations and other forms of assembly.
The amendments, which Mr.Sisi signed off on Friday, also allow military prosecutors to investigate incidents when army officers are tasked with law enforcement or when the President orders it. The country’s chief civilian prosecutor would have the final decision on whether to bring matters to trial.

World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN's postal agency have released a commemorative postage stamp today on the 40th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox. The head of the global health body expressed gratitude to a top Indian-origin UN official. In May 1980, the 33rd World Health Assembly issued its official declaration that the world and all peoples have won freedom from smallpox.
It ended after a 10-year WHO-spearheaded global effort that involved thousands of health workers around the world to administer half a billion vaccinations to stamp out smallpox.
WHO Director-General TedrosAdhanomGhebreyesus said, when WHO's smallpox eradication campaign was launched in 1967, one of the ways countries raised awareness about smallpox was through postage stamps.

The sal forest tortoise is widely distributed over eastern and northern India and Southeast Asia. However, it is not common in any of this terrain.
Also known as the elongated tortoise (Indotestudoelongata), the sal forest tortoise, recently assessed as critically endangered, is heavily hunted for food. It is collected both for local use, such as decorative masks, and international wildlife trade.
A recent study by ecologists in the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, finds that the area designated as a protected area network has only a small overlap with the actual habitat it roams around in.
According to the authors of the study published in the journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology, over 90% of the potential distribution of the species falls outside current protected area’s network.
Also, in northeast India, the representation of the species in protected areas is least, and there is little to no connectivity among most of the protected areas where the species is present.
According to the IUCN the population of the species may have fallen by about 80% in the last three generations (90 years).
There is little information on the population sizes of the sal forest tortoise, or any such species, mainly because they are so rare, live in remote areas of the forest and funding opportunities to study them are few.