Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 06 February 2017

:: National ::

V.K.Sasikala to become next CM of Tamil Nadu

Jayalalithaa’s friend and AIADMK general secretary V.K. Sasikala was “unanimously” elected leader of the Legislature Party at a meeting in the party headquarters, paving the way for her to become the third woman Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.
Ms. Sasikala, who has no formal political experience except for the last month-and-a-half, is expected to assume office on February 7 or 9. As per the constitutional mandate, she has to get elected to the Assembly as a legislator within six months of taking charge as Chief Minister.
Incumbent Chief Minister and party treasurer O. Panneerselvam, who proposed her name for the legislature party leader’s post at the MLAs’ meeting, announced that he would send his resignation to Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao.
Addressing the MLAs, 62-year-old Ms. Sasikala acknowledged the loyalty of Mr. Panneerselvam to the party and claimed it was he, who first urged her to take over as the general secretary as well as the Chief Minister soon after Jayalalithaa’s death.

Govt says they want to end the practice of triple talaq

The Centre is likely to take “a major step” to ban triple talaq after the ongoing Assembly polls, Union Law Minister said and dared the, the other parties to make their stand clear on the contentious issue.
Insisting that the issue is not related to religion but involves respect and dignity of women, he said the government “respects faith but worship and social evil cannot coexist.”
He said the tradition of triple talaq denies respect to women and the central government was committed to ending the “evil social practice.”
Asserting that “every pernicious practice” cannot be part of a religion, the minister, who is a lawyer himself, said the Centre would raise the issue in the Supreme Court on three points -- justice, equality and dignity of women.
Referring to the SP-Congress alliance in Uttar Pradesh, he said: “This is an alliance of desperation between two dynastic parties... and alliance of desperation between crime, criminals and corruption.”
Not a single big industry had been established in Uttar Pradesh during the tenure of the Akhilesh Yadav-led SP government, the BJP leader alleged, adding that funds sanctioned by the Centre for development of the state had not been used due to the feud within the Yadav family.

ISRO on the cusp of making history

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is on the cusp of making history when it sends 104 satellites into orbit on its PSLV-C37 rocket on February 15. Only three of them are Indian satellites.
Notably, in ISRO’s first mission of 2017, a single U.S. Earth imaging company, Planet, has made an eye-popping bulk booking for 88 of its small ‘cubesats’.
No space agency has launched such a large number of satellites in a single flight so far. (While ISRO’s PSLV launched 20 satellites last year, Russia’s Dnepr launcher holds the record for lifting 37 satellites to orbit in June 2014.)
The PSLV will carry a main remote-sensing satellite in the Cartosat-2 series and two small spacecraft, all for ISRO, and 101 small foreign commercial satellites.
The 88 cubesats are part of Planet’s earth observation constellation of 100 satellites. They weigh around 5 kg each and are called ‘Doves’ or Flock 3p. For California-based Planet, too, it will be the record largest number of cubesats to be flown in a single launch.
Planet, an earth observation company formed in 2010 by former NASA scientists, has chosen ISRO’s PSLV launch for the second time. It got its earlier set of 12 ‘Doves’ launched in June last year.
The main passenger on PSLV-C37 will be the fourth in the Cartosat-2 series, a very high resolution Earth observation satellite of about 650 kg, and occupies roughly half the space in the launch vehicle.
It will carry two more Indian nano satellites, INS-1A and INS-1B, each weighing about 10 kg. They have a short lifespan of six to 12 months.
All the payloads will totally weigh around 1,500 kg, according to an ISRO official who did not want to be named. The 88 Doves would be released in sets of four cubesats.
The other co-riders are cubesats or small specialised satellites of customers from Israel, the UAE, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
They will be released separately into their orbits at around 500 km from Earth. While ISRO has been cagey about giving details of its customers,
The Planet series comes even as COMSTAC, is considering if U.S. satellites can be sent to space on Indian launchers. PSLV’s U.S. clients were being approved on individual basis.

India-Bangladesh talked about Ganga basin development

Bangladesh and India have held talks on the Ganga basin development project after dialogue on the Teesta water sharing agreement slowed down.
The project is expected to feature prominently on the agenda of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s next visit to India which is yet to be finalised.
Joint dredging and development activities in the basin area are also part of the project.
The Ganga basin development project was first conceived during the UPA rule and came up for discussion during Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s Dhaka visit in 2011.
Former Bangladeshi ambassador Mohammed Zamir who is a specialist on the issue said Bangladesh needs India’s support to build a new Ganga barrage on its territory to operationalise the scheme.
The proposed barrage would provide a solution to aridity in the Bangladeshi territory that Dhaka blames on the Farakka barrage in India. Once completed, the Ganga barrage can hold water for the lower riparian system in the lean season.
Prime Minister Hasina’s visit has not been finalised so far even as talks on the Teesta river sharing has been stalled due to differences between West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Prime Minister Modi.

:: Business and Economy ::

To exemption from paying gift tax from company employees

Company employees receiving large gifts, whether from the company itself or from somebody else, will now have to pay tax if they are valued at more than Rs. 50,000, according to changes made in this Budget.
The Finance Bill 2017 has introduced an amendment to Section 56 of the Income Tax Act, which delineates the tax treatment meted out to ‘income from other sources.’
The earlier provisions were that if you get more than Rs. 50,000 from anybody but your close relatives, then the amount was subject to taxation.
According to tax experts, a large number of companies reward or compensate their senior employees with non-cash gifts, which will now be taxed.
Section 56 outlines the kinds of gifts and from whom they can be received to still be exempt from tax (close family, on the occasion of the marriage of the individual, by way of inheritance, for example).
But the Finance Bill 2017 seeks to widen the scope of the section, by applying it to more kinds of assessees.
The Revenue Secretary said that there was a need to continuously update the provisions of the Income Tax Act since people were always looking for ways to bypass and evade tax.
The Finance Bill 2017 also states that the existing exceptions contained in the section are proposed to be rationalised by including certain additional exceptions that will be added subsequently.
Towards this, it has been decided to sunset some of the clauses in the section such as clause (vii) which deals with the precise nature of the gifts and who can give them, and clause (vii a) which delineates the rules for companies receiving such gifts.
The amendments made to Section 56 of the Income Tax Act will come into force from the next financial year.

Cash transactions above 3 lakhs will attract penalty

In a bid to check generation of black money, a steep penalty awaits those accepting cash in excess of Rs. 3 lakh, beginning April 1, to settle any transaction.
A ban on cash transaction of more than Rs. 3 lakh has been proposed in the Budget for 2017-18.
The penalty for doing cash transaction will be steep and the receiver will have to pay an amount equivalent to the cash received.
So, if someone buys an expensive watch for cash, it is the shopkeeper who will have to pay the tax, he said, adding that the provision is to deter people from doing large cash transactions.
Demonetisation brought to account the stock of black money and now the government wants to stop future generation of the same.
The government, he said, will track all large cash transactions, and also curb the avenues of conspicuous consumption through cash.
People with large sum of unaccounted money usually spend it on holidaying or buying luxury items like cars, watches and jewellery.
The new cash curbs will mean that such spending avenues are curtailed, disincentivising people from generating black money.
However, the restrictions will not apply to the government, any banking company, post office savings bank or co-operative bank.

Big measures for agriculture sector in Budget

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced a slew of measures in the Union Budget 2017 to boost the agriculture sector.
Higher agricultural credit, higher allocation for irrigation projects, a crop insurance scheme and increased allocations for MGNREGA to dig farm ponds were among the measures announced on February 1.
But will these help attain the goal of doubling the farmer’s income by 2022, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi had first suggested last year?
The average monthly income of the Indian farm household was estimated to be about Rs. 6,426 by the Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households in its NSS 70th round.
This included net receipts from cultivation, farming of animals, non-farm business and income from wages. During the same period, the average monthly consumption expenditure per agricultural household was Rs. 6223.
For cultivation-related expenses, the farmer is mostly dependent on loans and the NSSO survey revealed that half of the farm households were neck-deep in debt.
Professor M. S. Swaminathan, noted that it was high time that the recommendations of the National Commission on Farmers - to provide the minimum price of the total cost of production plus 50% - are implemented.
“Agriculture will have to grow at 12 or 14% to realise such rise in earnings,” he said. At present, the growth rates stand at a poor 1.2%, according to World Bank data.
Tackling climate change and its potential impact also requires a budget to safeguard farmers.
Given the drought and errant rainfall affecting farmers, the government’s step to create five lakh more farm ponds that will work as a drought-proofing measure in gram panchayats is welcome, but everything depends on how well the schemes are executed on the ground.
National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change with the cost of Rs. 350 crore for 2015-16 and 2016-17, the government made only a paltry allocation of Rs. 130 crore to this Fund in the 2017-18 budget.
The credit ratings agency ICRA welcomed the expansion in coverage of National Agriculture Markets (e-NAM), an online agriculture market, from 250 to 585 APMCs in the Budget.
The subsidy hike of 6% for the phosphatic and potassic segment was also seen as a positive thrust for the manufacturers and traders of these fertilisers.
NABARD welcomed the hike in the corpus of the long-term irrigation fund by another Rs. 20,000 crore, taking the total fund size to Rs. 40,000 crore.
The setting up of a dairy processing and infrastructure development fund at NABARD, with a corpus of Rs. 8,000 crore over three years, was also appreciated by them.
Indian farmers do not constitute a homogenous community. There are rich, land-owning farmers and then there are poor, landless farmers.
Also, in spite of food price inflation in recent times, farmers’ gross income will not increase automatically. Being both producers and consumers of food, farmers do not stand to gain from inflation either.