Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 26 December 2016

:: National ::

To reduce road congestion six cities to get ferry services

In a move that promises to reduce congestion on roads, six cities along the river Ganga including Varanasi, Kolkata and Patna are going to get passenger ferry services.
The Inland Waterways Authority of India, Ministry of Shipping has recently entered into a contract with a joint venture of Infrastructure
Architecture Lab of MIT, U.S. and Thompson Design Group, Boston, U.S. for identifying suitable locations for construction of 18 ferry terminals in six cities of Allahabad, Varanasi, Patna, Munghyr, Kolkata and Haldia.
The consultants will prepare Detailed ProjectReport and tender documents for the 18 terminals.
This venture has earlier worked on similar transport solutions for Governors Island (172 acre island in the heart of New York Harbour in U.S.), Navy Pier, Chicago, and Bufalo Bayou, Texas.
The consultants will identify the best locations along the river and carry out technical and financial feasibility of the ferry services.

Stampede in Sabarimala

As many as 31 persons were injured, 12 of them seriously, in a minor stampede at Malikappuram at Sabarimala Sannidhanam on the eve of the annual Mandalam festival.
The stampede occurred immediately after the deep-aradhana at the hill shrine around 6.40 p.m. when an iron railing collapsed as a huge crowd of devotees on the northern side of the Lower Tirumuttom near Malikappuram.
It had been waiting for about seven hours to enter the Ayyappa Temple premises (Tirumuttom) through the Northern Gate, surged forward.

SC says criminal justice system should be sympathetic to sexual abuse victims

The time has come for criminal justice system to mould a survivor-centric approach in dealing with cases of sexual violence, especially for victims of child abuse for whom the trauma will scar them for life, the Supreme Court observed.
A Bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and A.M. Sapre said the criminal justice system needed significant reforms to institutionalise a more sympathetic approach in which the sexual abuse survivor was the focus.
The court was restoring the conviction of a man found guilty of raping his nine-year old niece in 2009. He was sent to jail for 12 years. The court found, in this case, positive proof and a credible sequence of events linking the man to the crime.
The verdict, based on the appeal filed by the HP govt, dismissed the defence's argument that there was a delay in filing the FIR in the rape case, which they claimed was fabricated.
Moreover, it added that “a decision to lodge FIR be-comes more difficult and harder when the accused happens to be a family member.”
Justices Sikri and Sapre also observed that in many cases rape by family members was not reported to the police by the victim or her immediate family, fearing social stigma.

Election commission says link Aadhaar with voter details

The Election Commission of India has given a mixed response to the Supreme Court on providing absentee voting rights, like electronic voting and proxy voting, to over 300 million domestic migrants in the country.
ECI says there is no foolproof mechanism to verify their identity and block duplicity.
The top poll body had last year set up a committee to study the possibility of amending the electoral law to empower voters who have migrated to other States within the country.
It said there was no reliable information or documentation on the number of domestic mi-grants in the country.
The last one on them is the 15-year-old 2001 Census data of 314.5 million.
Any provision of absentee voting rights to the “loosely defined term domestic migrants” would become a logistical nightmare for the Commission, that is, for ex-ample, they are so spread out that an election in one Assembly constituency would mean electoral arrangements in 4,120 Assembly constituencies.
Besides, enforcement of Model Code of Conduct would suffer and the concept of level playing field would get defeated with national parties having an advantage over State parties.
The Commission, how-ever, did not totally negate the idea of providing domestic migrants with absentee voting rights.
Commission says it might be extended only to a small subset of migrants who formed an identifiable and countable class of electors not delinked from their present place of registration and only “temporarily ab-sent” from their place of ordinary residence.

PM promises tax rebates for businessmen adopting digital transactions

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said there had been a 200-300 per cent increase in cashless trade in the past few days, and and promised in-come tax rebates for businessmen who adopted Digital transactions.
In his monthly radio broadcast, Mann ki Baat, Mr. Modi underlined that political parties were not above the law of the land, saying he had wanted to discuss political parties and political funding in Parliament.
Mr. Modi said: “It was my earnest wish that the ongoing campaign against corruption and black money, including the realm of political parties and political funding, be discussed extensively inParliament. Had the House functioned properly, there would have been comprehensive deliberation.
Whether it is an individual, an organisation or a political party, everyone has to abide by law. People who cannot endorse corruption and black money openly resort to searching for faults of the government relentlessly.”
Modi also talked about the Benami Property law that came into being in 1988, but neither its rules were framed, nor was it notified; it had remained dormant for years.

:: Business and Economy ::

FM said cashless Economy will increase revenue

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that moving to an economy with lower amounts of cash in circulation will help the country reduce its fiscal deficit and in-crease budgetary allocations for defence and rural infrastructure.
The Budget for the central government is about ₨20 lakh crore. This year, our revenues are likely to be about ₨16 lakh crore. Of this, half we get from income tax, and remaining we get from indirect taxes.
If India runs its economy honestly…there will be no ill-affects of cash economy, will we still super this loss? Will we not be able to improve infrastructure in rural are-a…government's capability to spend on poor people will not improve? FM said.
This is unethical,” he said, point-ing out the rise in high-value currency notes from 40 per cent in circulation to 86 per cent over the past 12-13 years.
Mr. Jaitley emphasised that long-term economic impact of the demonetisation move for a country like India will lead to a “better and cleaner” economy.
The Aadhaar-based pay-ment system is for people who don't have cards or mo-bile phones as they only need thumb print for transactions, Mr. Jaitley said.

CII says demonetisation will help in generating productive assets

CII said the demonetisation move would also enable banks to channel these to productive assets and ofer differentiated interest rates to borrowers while lowering the risk of bad loans in the future.
To achieve this, CII has re-commended the creation of an inter-linked digital data-base that could be accessed by financiers.
Union Bank of India chairman said that a comprehensive digital data infra-structure would provide banks the ability to identify fraud and data manipulation or stress early, while helping corporates to access cheaper credit.
All enterprises have some sort of identification and activity data available with different authorities, such as the revenue department, Registrar of Companies, EPFo, property tax department and utility providers.