Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 20 SEPTEMBER 2019

SSC CGL Current Affairs

::NATIONAL::

The Centre has proposed a new draft Code on Social Security that amalgamates eight laws covering Employees’ Provident Fund, maternity benefits and compensation among others that makes way for establishing funds for PF and pension as well as covering workers of the gig economy in social security schemes.
It proposes PF, pension and insurance funds that would be administered by a central board. Employees would also be able to opt for the National Pension Scheme if they want.
The draft code proposes schemes related to life and disability cover, health and maternity benefits and old-age protection for “gig workers and platform workers” as well as the unorganised sector.
As a part of its labour reform agenda, the government had proposed to combine 44 labour laws into four codes. After coming out with two codes on wages, occupational safety, health and working conditions it has not drafted the third.

India is unlikely to meet targets set under the ambitious PoshanAbhiyaan or National Nutrition Mission (NNM) for reduction in prevalence of stunting, underweight, low birth weight and anaemia in women and children by 2022 if there is no progress achieved in improving the rate of decline observed between 1990 and 2017, according to a new study.
The study points out that India will miss its target for stunting levels of 25% by 9.6%; underweight target of 22.7% by 4.8%; desired low birth level of 11.4% by 8.9%; anaemia level among women of 39.4% by 13.8%; and anaemia level among children of 44.7% by 11.7%, according to the Global Burden of Disease Study 1990-2017, released on Wednesday.
“Our findings suggest that the malnutrition indicator targets set by NNM for 2022 are aspirational, and the rate of improvement needed to achieve these targets is much higher than the rate observed in this study, which might be difficult to reach in a short period. This slow pace of improvement needs to be accelerated, so that future prevalence of the malnutrition indicators is better than our projections based on trends so far.”
“Additional efforts over the last two years in the PoshanAbhiyan as well as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan are likely to have hastened improvement,” said Professor LalitDandona, PHFI.

Finance Minister NirmalaSitharaman will hold a review meeting with public sector banks today.
Introduction of repo-rate linked products to step up affordable credit, doorstep banking facility, monitoring of loans to MSMEs, small traders, SHGs and micro finance Institutions borrowers and collaboration of banks with non-banking financial companies, NBFCs for co-origination of loans are some of the agenda expected to come up for discussion during the meeting.

Credit rating agency Moody’s has said that the increasing liquidity stress among real estate developers would indirectly hit Indian banks and is thus credit negative for the domestic lenders.
On September 12, real estate-focussed non-banking financial company (NBFC) Altico Capital India Ltd., defaulted on a scheduled interest payment on a loan because of insufficient liquidity.
Moody’s said Altico Capital’s default came after Dewan Housing Finance Ltd. defaulted on its loan obligations in July because of insufficient liquidity, raising questions about its solvency.
Indian banks also have indirect exposure to the real estate sector through their lending to NBFCs and HFCs, which also lend to real estate developers.

Israel's ruling Likud party and its main rival Blue and White party are tied at 32 seats each, putting the country's longest serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a shaky ground with his right-wing bloc falling five short of a majority in the 120-member Parliament.
According to the Times of Israel, Netanyahu's Likud and centrist challenger Benny Gantz's Blue and White stood at 32 seats each after counting of 90 per cent of ballots were completed. The elections were held yesterday.
The secular YisraelBeitenu party won nine seats, making its leader Avigdor Lieberman the king-maker in the elections, as predicted earlier in the exit polls.Netanyahu called the snap election after failing to form a governing coalition with a viable majority after April's vote.

As the deadline to re-establish communication with Chandrayaan 2’s Vikram lander nears, NASA’s moon orbiter has captured images of the lunar region where the Indian mission made an unsuccessful attempt to soft-land, a senior official with the U.S. space agency confirmed on September 19.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has snapped a series of images during its flyby on September 17 of Vikram’s attempted landing sight near the moon’s uncharted south pole.
According to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the lander Vikram and rover Pragyan were supposed to be functional only for 14 days from the day of their touchdown.
At the start of the mission, ISRO said the mission life of the lander and the rover will be one lunar day which is equal to 14 Earth days, whereas that of the orbiter will be one Earth year.
In the early hours of September 7, ISRO’s plan to soft-land Chandrayaan 2’s Vikram module on the lunar surface did not go as per script. The lander lost communication with ground stations during its final descent. ISRO officials said that the orbiter of Chandrayaan 2 remained healthy and safe.
A NASA spokesperson had earlier said that the space agency will share any before and after flyover imagery of the area around the targeted Chandrayaan 2 landing site to support analysis by ISRO.