Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 21 March 2016

:: NATIONAL ::

BJP meet says freedom of expression does not mean call to destroy country

The BharatiyaJanata Party’s two-day national executive kept its political preoccupations, both with the debate on nationalism and its attempts at making up with the Dalit community.
On the concluding day of the event, the party announced grand plans for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Mhow, the birth place of Constitution framer B.R. Ambedkar.
Meet also gave political resolution that “freedom of expression and nationalism do necessarily co-exist” but that this fundamental right does not cover calls to destroy the country.
Mr. Modi also said, in his address to the executive, that the party and the government “was accepting of political criticism of itself, but not of the nation.”
The resolution highlighted government efforts like building memorials for Ambedkar in Maharashtra and London where he had stayed or how entrepreneurs belonging to weaker sections were being given loans under the Mudra scheme to develop an “institution of Dalit entrepreneurs.”
Home Minister Rajnath Singh said Mr. Modi told partymen “not to be distracted by attempts by an envious opposition to embroil them in controversies.”

FM said interest rate cut will help economy

Faced with a fresh outcry over the decision to lower returns on small savings schemes, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the economy needs lower interest rates to become more efficient and high deposit rates would keep it “sluggish.”
Interest rates had risen a lot, so the cost of borrowing for the government and others was high, but now they have come down.
The way the economy is moving, we cannot have a situation where lending rates are going down but deposit rates remain high,” he said.
Both rates are linked. To make the economy more efficient rather than sluggish, the country has to move towards lower interest rates in both.
The government announced new interest rates on small savings instruments on Friday, slashing the returns on Public Provident Fund savings from 8.7 per cent to 8.1 per cent and one year post office deposits from 8.4 per cent to 7.1 per cent.
These interest rates will be reset every quarter based on a formula linked to the rate of return on government securities.

20 mew sites added to UNESCO biosphere nature reserves

The United Nation’s cultural body UNESCO has added 20 new sites to its network of protected biosphere nature reserves, including two in Canada and two in Portugal.
The status was conferred during a two-day meeting in Lima, which brought the total number of biosphere reserves to 669 across 120 countries.
In Canada, the Tsa Tue area in the country’s Northwest Territories that includes the last pristine arctic lake was added to the list, as was the Beaver Hills region of Alberta, which has a landscape formed by a retreating glacier.
Britain’s Isle of Man, located in the Irish Sea in a biologically diverse marine environment, and Mexico’s Isla Cozumel were also selected for the network.
And in Portugal, the entire Island of Sao Jorge, the fourth largest in the Azores Archipelago, was designated a reserve in addition to the Tajo River region between Portugal and Spain.
The list of new UNESCO biosphere reserves also includes sites in Algeria, Ghana, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, the Philippines and Tanzania.
Of the hundreds of locations on the list, 16 are sites that stretch across more than one country. Spain is the country with the largest number of registered reserves.
Meanwhile, the Australia ended its push to log World Heritage-listed forests on the island State of Tasmania on Sunday, after UNESCO issued a report calling for the area to remain protected from logging.

:: INTERNATIONAL ::

U.S. President to make historical Cuba visit

U.S. President Barack Obama wasdue in Cuba on Sunday to bury the hatchet in a more than half-century-long Cold War conflict that turned the communist island and its giant neighbour into bitter enemies.
Reversing generations of U.S. attempts to cut Cuba from the outside world, Mr. Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters will arrive in Havana for a three-day trip.
It won’t just be the first visit by a sitting U.S. President since Fidel Castro’s guerrillas overthrew the U.S.-backed government of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, but the first since President Calvin Coolidge came 88 years ago.
Mr. Obama, seeking to leave a historic foreign policy mark in his final year in office, was due to see old town Havana, hold talks with Cuban President Raul Castro on Monday, and attend a baseball game.
For Cubans dreaming of escaping isolation and reinvigorating their threadbare economy, the visit has created huge excitement.
Although Mr. Obama has already loosened restrictions on U.S. citizens visiting Cuba, the lifting of the decades-old U.S. economic embargo can only be decided by a Republican-dominated Congress that is far less keen on detente with Cuba.
Republicans and some human rights activists have also criticised Mr. Obama for dealing with Mr. Castro when so many freedoms in Cuba, ranging from the media to politics and economic entrepreneurship, remain highly curtailed.

EU-Turkey refugee deal comes into force

Flimsy boats packed with migrants continued to land in Greece from Turkey on Sunday despite the start a landmark deal between the European Union and Ankara to stem the massive influx.
Under the controversial deal, which came into force at midnight, all migrants landing on the Greek islands face being sent back to Turkey.
And in a grim start to an agreement designed to stop people from making a journey fraught with danger, two little girls were found drowned and two Syrian refugees died of heart attacks on the perilous crossing.
Greek authorities said 875 migrants landed on the islands overnight, with some 15 boats, each carrying dozens of migrants, arriving on Lesbos alone on Sunday.

:: SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY ::

Space probe New Horizons result revealed by NASA

NASA scientists associated with interplanetary space probe New Horizons have revealed the former “astronomer’s planet” and its “intriguing system of small moons” in a comprehensive set of papers describing results from last summer’s Pluto system flyby.
After a 9.5-year, three-billion-mile journey — launching faster and travelling farther than any spacecraft to reach its primary target — New Horizons zipped by Pluto on July 14 last year.
New Horizons’ seven science instruments collected about 50 gigabits of data on the spacecraft’s digital recorders, most of it coming over nine busy days surrounding the encounter.
Observing Pluto and Charon up close has caused us to completely reassess thinking on what sort of geological activity can be sustained on isolated planetary bodies in this distant region of the solar system.

BIRAC to start an seed fund to tackle anti-microbial resistance

In a move to encourage biotechnology start-ups as well as tackle the threat faced by India from resistance to antimicrobial drugs.
The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) — through the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) — has invested an initial $1,00,000 to start an India-focussed seed fund to help groups in India compete for the Longitude Prize.
This is a £ 10 million prize offered by Nesta, a U.K. charity, to any individual group anywhere in the world that develops an affordable, effective diagnostic test to detect resistance to microbes.
BIRAC, since its inception, has supported several social entrepreneurs, BIRAC is supported by the DBT.
India faces increasing instances of tuberculosis patients being resistant to front line drugs. Experts say this is due to lax monitoring and profligate prescription by medical authorities that allow these drugs to be easily available.
The World Health Organisation statistics for 2014 give an estimated incidence figure of 2.2 million cases of TB for India out of a global incidence of 9 million, with instances of drug-resistant TB rapidly rising.
Last December, the DBT laid out a strategy whereby biotechnology would be at the foundation of a $100-billion industry by 2025, rising from the current $7-$10 billion.
The National Biotechnology Development Strategy, as it is called, expects to launch four missions in healthcare, food and nutrition, clean energy and education; create a technology development and translation network across India with global partnership.

:: BUSINESS and ECONOMY ::

Employee’s facing ate cut of PPF and other small savings

The government has defended its move to cut rates on small savings schemes from April 1, 2016, its own employees are anxious about the prospect of a similar lowering of interest on their retirement savings under the General Provident Fund or GPF.
Historically, the rate of return credited to all government employees under the GPF has moved in tandem with the returns on public provident fund or PPF investments.
The government announced that the PPF rate has been lowered from 8.7 per cent this year to 8.1 per cent for the first quarter of 2016-17.
For 2014-15, the government had notified the interest rate on small savings schemes and GPF on the same day — March 4, 2014.
Last year, the small savings scheme returns were announced on March 31, 2015, while the rate of return on GPF and other state PFs.
The 8.7 per cent rate on GPF and other government staff PFs remains in effect till further orders.
Last April, while notifying the interest rate on all state PFs including the GPF, the government said it had decided to link these rates to the PPF rates for 2015-16.
However, the PPF rates would now be recalibrated every quarter.
The PPF is considered an easily accessible long-term investment instrument for millions who are not employed in the formal sector and therefore, have neither GPF nor EPF account.
EPF accounts are available to all employees earning upto Rs 15,000 a month in firms employing twenty or more workers.
There are an estimated 3.2 million central government employees in the country, apart from millions of state government employees who are usually paid the same rate of return as the GPF.
The 8.7 per cent rate for GPF is also paid on nine other provident funds that include funds dedicated to ordnance factories’ and naval dockyards’ workmen, armed forces personnel, defence services officers.

Banks are likely to reduce interest rates on home and car loans

Banks are likely to announce revised interest rates, starting April 1, which will lower the amount one earns on deposits and make home and car loans cheaper.
Lenders may wait till the monetary policy review, due on 5 April, to take a call on rates. The market expects the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to cut interest rate by at least 25 bps.
A long standing demand by the banks has finally been met by the government which lowered the interest rate of small savings scheme. The interest reduction is various schemes was anywhere between 60 and 130 bps.
Banks have been stating that due to competition from small savings scheme they were not able to reduce their deposit rate further.
As a result, the cost of funds were not coming down and hence lending rates could not be lowered.
The Reserve Bank of India has been prodding banks to cut lending rates in line with the reduction in policy interest rate.
While RBI has reduced repo rate by 125 bps since January 2015, which now stands at 6.75 per cent , banks’ lending rate reduction was only 70 bps.
The cut in small savings rate now gives more room to banks to reduce their deposit rates.
For example, the rate for one-year term deposit under the small savings scheme was reduced to 7.1 per cent from 8.4 per cent.
The State Bank of India’s one-year deposit rate offers 7.25 per cent (1 year to 455 days tenure). The revised small savings rates will be effective from April 1.
Clearly as banks reduce deposit rates, the cost of funds — a key component that goes into the pricing of loans — will come down.
The other reason why lending rates will come down is because banks will shift to Marginal Cost of Funds based Lending Rate (MCLR) from 1 April, as directed by RBI. This new regime of loan pricing will replace the existing regime of Base Rate.
In the base rate regime, most banks considered average cost of funds while calculating the benchmark lending rate or the Base rate.

SEBI finds various irregularities in Vijay Mallya’s dealings

Finding prima facie evidence of non-compliance to various norms, including those on insider trading and corporate governance, the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has widened its probe into the dealings of Vijay Mallya-headed UB Group.
The capital markets watchdog may also seek information from other regulators in India and abroad, as also from the stock exchanges, even as it seeks to de-clog the complex transactions Mallya had entered into, including sale of stake and transfer of rights in his various group companies.
SEBI began looking into Mallya-Diageo transactions last month, soon after the liquor baron inked a Rs. 515-crore ‘sweetheart deal’ to exit United Spirits, suspecting possible violations of corporate governance and other norms.
SEBI had found prima-facie evidence of non-compliance to various transactions, while stepping up its cooperation with other regulators and agencies that are separately looking into alleged violations in relation to the massive loans taken by the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines of UB Group.
Detailed queries sent to Mallya, including about his possible return to India and the prima-facie evidence found by SEBI, did not elicit any response.