Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 27 February 2017

:: National ::

Memorandum of Procedure for appointment of judges to be finalised soon

Supreme Court Collegium is engaged in exhaustive consultations to finalise the long-pending Memorandum of Procedure for appointment of judges and draft clauses.
The MoP draft was handed over to the Collegium by the government in August 2016. But no progress was made in resolving the differences till J.S. Khehar took over as Chief Justice of India.
Clauses in the draft MoP, like the executive’s prerogative to reject judicial candidates recommended by the Collegium on the ground of “national security,” are no longer a roadblock.
Justice T.S. Thakur, Chief Justice Khehar’s immediate predecessor, had time and again made strong observations against perceived government inaction.
However, since Chief Justice Khehar took over, there has been an improvement in relations strained since the Constitution Bench scrapped the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act in 2015.

Immigration restrictions to be highlighted by Foreign Secretary in U.S.

Immigration restrictions in the U.S. are likely to be highlighted as Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar travels to Washington D.C. to meet senior U.S. officials this week.
Mr. Jaishankar is expected to discuss the way forward in bilateral ties, including a possible visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the U.S. in the next few months.
The visit also comes days after an Indian engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla’s killing in an alleged hate attack shooting in Kansas. Many, including Venkaiah Naidu, have demanded the “strongest action from the U.S. administration,” in the matter.
During their telephone conversation last month, Mr. Trump invited Mr. Modi to Washington. The two leaders are also expected to meet on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Germany in early July.

According to New World Wealth, Mumbai is the richest city in the country

India’s financial capital Mumbai, which is home to 46,000 millionaires and 28 billionaires, is the richest Indian city with a total wealth of $820 billion, says a report.
According to New World Wealth, Mumbai is the richest city in the country, followed by Delhi and Bengaluru in the second and third place respectively.
Delhi is home to 23,000 millionaires and 18 billionaires with a total wealth of $450 billion, while Bengaluru with a total wealth of $320 billion houses 7,700 millionaires and 8 billionaires.
The list also includes Hyderabad with a total wealth of $310 billion. Hyderabad is home to 9,000 millionaires and 6 billionaires.
Kolkata, home to 9,600 millionaires and 4 billionaires has a total wealth of $290 billion.

The railways will soon manufacture its own high speed train sets

The railways will soon manufacture its own train sets that can run at a maximum speed of 160 kilometre per hour, after its global bid in this regard failed to elicit positive response.
Aptly named ‘Train-2018’, the first train set — a rake without a separate locomotive — is expected to be ready by March next year and likely to be pressed into service in Delhi-Lucknow or Delhi-Chandigarh sector.
A train set, much like a Delhi Metro rake, comprises of many coaches that are individually powered by a propulsion system, eliminating the need for locomotive.
Aiming to offer both comfort and pace to passengers, the project will roll out semi-high speed, 16-coach train sets with quicker acceleration and world-class passenger amenities.
For the first time in Indian Railways, these train sets will have automatic plug type doors that will open and close at stations, wide windows for panoramic view, and ergonomically designed seating.
Equipped with bio-toilets, all coaches in the fully AC train set will be inter-connected so that passengers can move from one coach to other with ease.
As per the Rs. 200 crore project, two train sets will be manufactured, in collaboration with foreign players on transfer of technology basis, for which the ICF has floated a fresh global tender.
The railways had floated a global tender for procurement-cum-maintenance and manufacture of 15 train sets with 315 coaches in June, 2015.
Though five bidders had qualified for the initial round, they did not find the offer viable and asked for raising the tender size to 1,000 coaches.

India has intensified efforts to increase Aerial surveeillance

With Pakistan and China rapidly modernising their air forces, India has intensified efforts to fill the gaps in its aerial surveillance.
After handing over the first indigenously developed airborne early warning and control system, Netra, to the Indian Air Force, the DRDO has set its sights on a much larger and more capable system.
India is also in negotiations with Israel to buy two more Phalcon Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) mounted on Russian IL-76 aircraft to add to the three systems in service.
India is hopeful of concluding the deal before Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Tel Aviv possibly in June.
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said the gaps in AWACS were being corrected. Various programmes were being pursued simultaneously.
The DRDO has The DRDO has planned to develop a long-range AWACS with a 360-degree coverage akin to the Phalcon. He said it would take six years to get the system “totally functional”.
The DRDO plans to develop two AWACS at first and then another four. “As the AWACS is much heavier, it needs a bigger aircraft. They would be based on an Airbus A-330.
The Netra AEW&C system would join the three Phalcon A-50 long-range AWACS mounted on Russian IL-76 transport aircraft. These aerial radars, called eye-in-the-sky, are game-changers in warfare.
The Netra AEW&C system has an indigenous radar mounted on the Embraer Emb-145 aircraft and three systems are being developed. The system handed over is in the initial operational configuration (IOC).
The DRDO will carry out an advanced testing of the systems and avionics on the Netra and the final operational configuration is expected to be achieved by June. By then, the second system will also be ready.
The present system gives a 240-degree coverage of airspace. The three aircraft would be based at Bhatinda facing the western border. The Emb-145 also has air-to-air refuelling capability for longer surveillance time.
This capacity will be tested and certified in the next few months. India had made similar attempts in the past, which ended tragically.
The DRDO began a project in the 1980s to build an AWACS, later renamed Project Airawat, but it was cancelled after a prototype crashed in 1999, killing all eight persons on board.

:: International ::

Iran’s Navy began an annual drill near the strategic Strait of Hormuz

Iran’s Navy began an annual drill on Sunday near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, its first major exercise since the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Two-day manoeuvre will cover an area of two million sq. km in the Sea of Oman and the Indian Ocean near the strait. It showed Iranian warships taking part in the exercise.
Nearly a third of all oil traded by sea passes through the strait and it has been the scene of confrontations between the U.S. and Iran.
But the drill does not involve Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary force the U.S. Navy often criticises for harassing its vessels.

United States and China are about to become neighbours in Djibouti

United States and China are about to become neighbours in this sun-scorched patch of East African desert.
China is constructing its first overseas military base in Djibouti — just a few miles from Camp Lemonnier, one of the Pentagon’s largest and most important foreign installations.
With increasing tensions over China’s island-building efforts in the South China Sea, U.S. strategists worry that a naval port could provide a front-row seat to the staging ground for U.S. counterterrorism operations in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.
Established after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Camp Lemonnier is home to 4,000 personnel. Some are involved in highly secretive missions, including targeted drone killings in West Asia and the Horn of Africa.
The base, which is run by the Navy and abuts Djibouti’s international airport, is the only permanent U.S. military installation in Africa.
Billions of dollars in Chinese loans to Djibouti’s heavily indebted government, wonder about the long-term durability of an alliance that has served Washington well in its global fight against Islamic extremism.
Just as important, experts say, the base’s construction is a milestone marking Beijing’s expanding global ambitions — with potential implications for the United States’s long-standing military dominance.
Chinese officials play down the significance of the base, saying it will largely support anti-piracy operations that have helped quell the threat to international shipping once posed by marauding Somalis.
In addition to having 2,400 peacekeepers in Africa, China has used its vessels to escort more than 6,000 boats from many countries through the Gulf of Aden, the Ministry said.
China’s military has also evacuated its citizens caught in the world’s trouble spots. In 2011, the military plucked 35,000 from Libya, and 600 from Yemen in 2015.
It helps that the Chinese are paying $20 million a year in rent to the country, on top of the billions they are spending to finance critical infrastructure, including ports and airports.
Also a new rail line and a pipeline that will bring desperately needed drinking water from neighbouring Ethiopia.

:: Business and Economy ::

Markets regulator SEBI is in favour of a major overhaul

SEBI is in favour of a major overhaul of the way boards of listed firms discharge their duties, including for appointment and removal of directors, and also wants their audit committees to be empowered to identify future risks.
There is also a need for “greater tolerance” and transparency in discussions and decisions taken at the board level and by various board committees of listed companies.
However the regulator would prefer them to adopt best global practices in this regard voluntarily rather than being dictated to do so with a new set of stringent rules.
While a ‘guidance note’ was issued last month by the Securities and Exchange Board of India on board evaluation at listed companies, there is a view that SEBI should come out with a new set of regulations to ensure greater compliance.
The regulator may soon come out with a further detailed guidance note while it is also mulling launching a public consultation process to understand whether there is a need for a new set of rules and what those could be, a top official said.
The move assumes significance in the wake of the recent boardroom battle at the Tata group and the controversy surrounding the reported differences between some promoters and the top management at Infosys.
Corporate governance has been a key focus area, with a huge emphasis on safeguarding the interests of minority shareholders in listed companies, during the six—year tenure of current chairman U.K. Sinha.
The proposed moves will also take into account the suggestions made in this regard by the regulator’s International Advisory Board, which was set up to advise it on best global regulatory practices and evolution of various policies.
The IAB suggested that a matrix of expertise may be introduced to make the boards diverse, balanced and in tune with the requirements for effective functioning of the company.
It has also called for “full transparency” in board appointments and removal process.

Buy back options on boom in stock market

For stock market, the most interesting and common thread of discussion currently is that of buy-back offers and how investors can profit from some of the mega offerings that are scheduled to hit the market in the near future.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has already said that it plans to buy back up to 5.61 crore equity shares at a price of Rs. 2,850 per share.
The offer size of Rs. 16,000 crore makes it the largest buy-back offer till date in India, surpassing the Rs. 10,400 crore offer by Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) in 2012.
Sector heavyweight Infosys has also initiated the process to amend its Articles of Association (AoA) to include the provision for a buy-back as mandated by the new Companies Act.
Market participants are of the view that Indian software majors should look at buy-back offers since they have large cash reserves and, at a time when business is showing signs of slowdown, it would be a good exercise to keep shareholders happy by way of such offers.
TCS has a cash and cash equivalent balance of close to Rs. 38,000 crore, as per the financials for the quarter ended December 31, 2016. Infosys reported a balance of Rs. 32,697 crore at the end of the financial year 2015-16.
For Infosys, the cash balance had steadily increased from Rs. 25,950 crore in FY14 to Rs. 30,367 crore in FY15.
Does the shareholder gain or the company in a buy-back, is the oft-asked question from investors.
Simply put, the two are intertwined since it’s the shareholder that gains if the company does well in terms of better profitability and earnings upgrade.
In a report released February 8, global financial major BNP Paribas said that large and mid-sized Asian companies with a market capitalisation of more than $1 billion that bought back more than 10% of their equity since 2009.
In the case of a buy-back, since the equity shares bought back are extinguished, the company’s financial metrics including earnings per share (EPS) and return on equity (RoE) typically improve.
A management team typically plans a buy-back when it feels that the company shares are under-valued or, in other words, do not reflect the true fundamentals of the entity.
Indian companies like Cairn India, Bharat Electronics, Piramal Enterprises, Bayer Cropscience and National Aluminum, among others, have opted for buy-backs in the recent past.
There is an increasing trend among Indian companies to use the buy-back route to reward shareholders.
Data from Prime Database shows that the current financial year saw 33 buy-back offers amounting to Rs. 28,460 crore – the highest in any fiscal till date.
Still, on the global map it is too little to catapult India to the top league. As per BNP Paribas, barring companies in Japan, Asian companies are not known for their buy-back penchant.