Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 19 October 2015

:: National ::

after achieving a new milestone in assets under management (AUM) and subscriber base early this month, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) is looking for some fiscal support from the government for its ongoing move to expand subscriber base further.
The AUM of its national pension system (NPS) has crossed Rs.1-trillion-mark in the first week of October at around Rs.1,10,000 crore, while the NPS subscriber base also crossed 1-crore-mark in the first week of October.
“Our efforts are now targeted at expanding the subscriber base further, particularly in the corporate and the private citizens segments.
We are looking to an early breakthrough in this segment, which will grow the base and coverage significantly,” PFRDA Member R. V. Verma, told PTI.
The regulator is also working towards further improving the infrastructure for minimising the response time. As part of this measure, PFRDA is more closely co-ordinating with the Centre and States whose share accounts for over 90 per cent of the total AUM.
Other important area of the regulator’s initiative is to harmonise the scope of NPS for the government and private/corporate sector, thus bringing parity between these two segments in terms of choice of pension fund managers and investment allocation choice.

Thousands of Tibetans worldwide voted on Sunday for a political leader to keep up their struggle for greater freedom in China and to head their exiled government.
Harvard-educated Lobsang Sangay, current prime minister of the exiled government who is recontesting for the top job, is the front runner ahead of four others.
But rival candidate Lukar Jam Atsok is looking to make waves, advocating Tibet’s complete independence from China, rather than the exiled government’s more moderate stance of greater autonomy for their homeland.
In the preliminary round of voting, 87,000 exiled Tibetans in about a dozen countries from Australia to the United States are registered to cast ballots for a prime minister and for a new exiled 44-member parliament.
Monks, nuns and families stood in long queues waiting to vote at the main temple in the northern Indian hill station of Dharamsala, where the exiled government is based.
A final round of voting is scheduled for March next year when the new prime minister and parliament will be announced. The election is only the second since the Dalai Lama retired as political head four years ago.

Reserve Bank governor Raghuram Rajan on Monday slammed International Monetary Fund for staying on the sidelines and applauding accommodative policies of developed nations which have created ripples in the emerging markets.
He said central banks across the world are worried about deflation and want to promote growth to avert it at any cost.
“The IMF is supposed to look at these in a global sense, but the IMF has been sitting on the sidelines applauding these kinds of policies ever since they were initiated and hasn’t really questioned the value of these kinds of policies,” said Rajan, who was the former chief economist of IMF.
IMF does spillover studies which invariably say that these policies are good for a country and therefore good for the world, he said at an event in Mumbai.
“Unfortunately if we look at central banking mandates across the world, no central bank has a mandate for the world.
“Its mandate is purely domestic...what are you going to do to elevate employment and growth. It has to worry about the world only at second level...if I do something which creates problems for another country and as a result demand from that country falls off from my country’s, I should take that into account. I don’t care if I destroy the other country completely, so long as it doesn’t import from me” he added.

The ‘Make In India’ campaign of the Union government was bound to fail as the deteriorating law and order situation in the country would deter foreign investors, said eminent lawyer Prasanth Bhushan.
Interacting with mediapersons here on Sunday, Mr. Bhushan voiced fears that the law and order situation in the country would worsen further in the coming months as the government had not acted against fascist tendencies.
No investor would invest in the country in its given situation.
The Modi government can bid goodbye to its campaign, he said. Mr. Bhushan said the Centre was encouraging money laundering in the name of bringing black money back to the country.
The government was allowing black money to be parked in tax havens.