Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 11 December 2020

SSC CGL Current Affairs

::NATIONAL::

The Bharatiya Kisan Union has moved the Supreme Court seeking its intervention to end the deadlock over the farm laws.
The union has filed an intervention application in top court. It has challenged the three laws that were enacted by the Centre in September.
The union in its plea said that laws the laws were passed hastily without having an adequate discussion.
The implementation of the acts in its current form will spell disaster for the farming community by opening a parallel market which is regulated and gives enough places for exploitation of the farmers.
"That without agriculture produce market committee acting as a protective shield around the farmers, the market would ultimately fall to the corporate greed of multinational companies who are more profit oriented and have no care for the condition of the farmers,” it added. It further said that the laws will corporatise agriculture.
Farmers have been agitating for the past two weeks against the new agri laws. They have announced that they will block railway tracks if their demands are not met by the government. The farmer unions said they will soon announce a date for blocking tracks across the country. Farmers are demanding a rollback of the agri laws.

According to Urban Governance Index (UGI), Odisha has topped all Indian states in urban governance while Manipur and Nagaland areat the bottom.
It was recently released by the Praja Foundation.he Praja Foundation said the study for the Urban Governance Index 2020 conducted over three years (2017-2020) in 40 cities across 28 states as well as the NCT of Delhi.
It comprised 1,568 interviews, 20 state-level consultations, one regional consultation and a national-level consultation with key stakeholders such as elected city representatives.
UGI ranks states to indicate where they stand in terms of real empowerment of grassroot democracy and local self-government.
Index showed that no state has devolved the 18 functions mentioned in the 12th Schedule (deals withMunicipalities) of the Constitution to their city governments.

In Covid pandemic time, the Central government has made a record payment to MG-NREGA workers, the world’s biggest job guarantee scheme, in the financial year 2020-21.
It resulting in the rural development ministry being left with 10% of the total funds to be spent on the scheme in the remaining four months of the current fiscal year, shows government data.
The rural development ministry, MG-NREGA scheme, was provided with Rs 84,900 crore for the current financial year by the finance ministry in two instalments. Of this amount, the ministry data shows, Rs 76, 800 crore has already been spent. In comparison, till November 2019, the ministry had spent about Rs 50,000 crore on the scheme.
According to MG-NREGA tracker said the huge expenditure on the scheme was on account of 10 million more households getting work under the MG-NREGA this year (till November), 243% increase in person days (work) generated and higher wage paid to workers as compared to previous years. The total active job cards this year was 90.2 million and of them, 83.09% sought work,” the tracker prepared by People Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG).
The report also said that around 13% of the 75 million households, who demand work, got no work. “The data shows that there was a surge for NREGA work demand due to the pandemic and the government failed to meet the demand,” the report said.

US President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have been named by the prestigious TIME magazine as '2020 Person of the Year' for changing the American story.
It named the Democratic leaders for its annual prestigious honour, choosing them over other finalists - frontline health care workers, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr Anthony Fauci, the Movement for Racial Justice and US President Donald Trump.
“For changing the American story, for showing that the forces of empathy are greater than the furies of division, for sharing a vision of healing in a grieving world, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is TIME’s 2020 Person of the Year.

New preliminary figures show that, a locked-down pandemic-struck world cut its carbon dioxide emissions this year by 7%.
The Global Carbon Project, an authoritative group of dozens of international scientists who track emissions, calculated that the world will have put 37 billion U.S. tons (34 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in the air in 2020.
Scientists say this drop is chiefly because people are staying home, traveling less by car and plane, and that emissions are expected to jump back up after the pandemic ends.
The same group of scientists months ago predicted emission drops of 4% to 7%, depending on the progression of COVID-19. A second coronavirus wave and continued travel reductions pushed the decrease to 7%.
Emissions dropped 12% in the United States and 11% in Europe, but only 1.7% in China.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) successfully demonstrated communication between its two labs using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) technology, which is a “robust” way to share encryption keys, said an official statement.
In the QKD technology, encryption keys are sent as qubits in a fibre optic cable. Quantum computing uses qubits as basic resources, similar to how bits are used as basic resources in classical computing.
The QKD is designed in a way that if an illegitimate entity tries to read the transmission, it will disturb the qubits - which are encoded on photons - and this will generate transmission errors, leading to legitimate end users being immediately informed.
The Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL) and The Research Centre Imarat (RCI) were the two labs that participated in this demonstration.
“Quantum Communication using the time-bin QKD scheme was performed under realistic conditions. The setup also demonstrated the validation of detection of a third party trying to gain knowledge of the communication.
Time-bin encoding is used to encode qubit on a photon.

Former Mumbai Cricket Association president and BJP leader Ashish Shelar has filed his nomination for the president's post in the Boxing Federation of India, challenging incumbent Ajay Singh in elections to be held on December 18.
The BFI elections have been due since September but were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The process will be conducted during the body's AGM in Gurugram.