Current Affairs Update – 1st July, 2015

Hello and welcome to ExamPundit. Here are the Important Current Affairs of 1st July, 2015. These are very important for the upcoming SBI PO Mains 2015 and RBI Assistant 2015 Exam.

• Pension regulator PFRDA will soon allow private sector NPS monies to be invested in exchange traded funds.
• This will form part of the investment guidelines to be specifically issued out for private sector schemes of National Pension System (NPS), PFRDA Chairman Hemant Contractor said here on Wednesday.
• Simply put, the NPS related contributions made by employees of corporate sector (private sector) will be allowed to be invested in ETFs.
• As of June 27 this year, the total assets under management in respect of private sector schemes of NPS stood at Rs. 6,272 crore.
• R.V. Verma, PFRDA Member, said that the upcoming investment guidelines will specifically allow private sector NPS monies to be parked in ETFs created for disinvestment of equity stakes held by Government (like the CPSE ETF issued last year).
• Private sector NPS monies would be allowed to be invested in other regular ETFs also, he added.
• PFRDA had recently revised the investment guidelines for Government sector NPS (basically contributions of central government and state government employees) and allowed their NPS funds to be parked in ETFs as well.

• BHEL executed the 500 MW, oil-fired Kosti thermal power project on an engineering, procurement and construction basis. The company designed, manufactured, supplied and installed the power project with four units of 125 MW each, BHEL said in a statement.
• The project uses crude oil from South Sudan as fuel, for which BHEL designed special boilers. The major equipment -- boilers, steam turbines, generators, controls and instrumentation and transformers - were made in-house. BHEL also constructed a canal from the White Nile River to supply water for the project, which is funded by a $350 million loan from India, according to the statement.
• The Kosti project is BHEL's largest outside India and the first for the company in Africa. Overseas projects that BHEL is executing include the 64 MW Grand Katende hydro project in Congo, 18 MW power plant in Comoros, 8x183 MW Keban hydro rehabilitation project in Turkey and three hydro projects in Bhutan with a combined capacity of 2,940 MW.

• Taxi hailing app Ola has announced that Ratan Tata has invested in the company in his personal capacity. This is Tata's eighth investment in an e-commerce company.
• Ola currently serves millions of customers in over a 100 cities across India through 150,000 vehicles registered on its platform. Through Ola’s mobile app, customers can book cabs, autos and taxis from around them to their doorstep within minutes of requesting.
• This growth has been further accelerated with the acquisition of TaxiForSure, India’s second largest cab aggregator in March 2015. Ola has leveraged its strength as an on-demand platform by going beyond transportation into instant food delivery with OlaCafé, currently available in beta across four cities.

• Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi on 1 July 2015 launched the Digital India Week in New Delhi.
• The newly created week is aimed at encouraging people’s involvement and creating awareness among them about various initiatives launched under the Digital India Programme launched in August 2014.
• The Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY) is the nodal agency for implementing the Digital India Programme in close cooperation with other departments and ministries.
• Digital India has been envisioned as an ambitious umbrella programme to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.

• Digital Locker System aims to minimize the usage of physical documents and enable sharing of e-documents across agencies. The sharing of the e-documents will be done through registered repositories thereby ensuring the authenticity of the documents online, says the government.
• MyGov.in has been implemented as a platform for citizen engagement in governance, through a "Discuss", "Do" and "Disseminate" approach. The mobile app for MyGov would bring these features to users on a mobile phone.
• Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) Mobile app would be used by people and Government organizations for achieving the goals of Swachh Bharat Mission.
• eSign framework would allow citizens to digitally sign a document online using Aadhaar authentication.
• The Online Registration System (ORS) under the eHospital application has been introduced. 
• This application provides important services such as online registration, payment of fees and appointment, online diagnostic reports, enquiring availability of blood online etc, the government claims.
• National Scholarships Portal is said to be a one stop solution for end to end scholarship process right from submission of student application, verification, sanction and disbursal to end beneficiary for all the scholarships provided by the Government of India.
• Digitize India Platform (DIP) for large scale digitization of records in the country that would facilitate efficient delivery of services to the citizens.
• Bharat Net, a high speed digital highway to connect all 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats of country. This would be the world's largest rural broadband connectivity project using optical fibre.
• Policy initiatives have also been undertaken by in the e-Governance domain like e-Kranti Framework, Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India, Framework for Adoption of Open Source Software in e-Governance Systems, Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Government of India, E-mail Policy of Government of India, Policy on Use of IT Resources of Government of India, Policy on Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications, Application Development & Re-Engineering Guidelines for Cloud Ready Applications
• BSNL has introduced Next Generation Network (NGN), to replace 30 year old exchanges, which is an IP based technology to manage all types of services like voice, data, multimedia/ video and other types of packet switched communication services.
• Electronics Development Fund (EDF) Policy aims to promote Innovation, R&D, and Product Development and to create a resource pool of IP within the country to create a self-sustaining eco-system of Venture Funds.
• National Centre for Flexible Electronics (NCFlexE) is an initiative of Government of India to promote research and innovation in the emerging area of Flexible Electronics.
• Centre of Excellence on Internet on Things (IoT) is a joint initiative of Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), ERNET and NASSCOM.

• Kerala Tourism has hit the streets of Shanghai with a first-ever roadshow aimed at attracting high-spending Chinese tourists from the world’s largest outbound tourism market.
• The roadshow, which comes close on the heels of Kerala Tourism’s first-time participation in Beijing International Tourism Expo (BITE) 2015 last week, was held yesterday, with 70 buyers from the Chinese travel and tourism industry in attendance.
• The event at the sprawling Hotel Jinjiang Tower witnessed a huge footfall and a large presence of the mainstream and local Chinese media, a release said here today.
• Consul General of India in Shanghai, Naveen Srivastava was chief guest at the event where the Kerala delegation was headed by Secretary, Kerala Tourism, G Kamala Vardhana Rao.
• The show also saw the presence of prominent Chinese travel companies, including Ctrip, HH travel, CYTS Tour Cooperation, Shanghai Eastern Air International Travel Corporation and Shanghai Johnson international travel services.
• Kerala Tourism had participated in the three-day BITE 2015, the leading Asian travel and tourism fair, where the tourism department had set up a pavilion themed on backwaters and ‘Kalaripayattu’

• Government today approved the setting up of an online national agriculture market that will provide more options to farmers for selling their produce.
• A decision in this regard was taken at a meeting of the Union Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “The proposal on the creation of a National Agriculture Market has been approved by the Cabinet,” sources said.
• Currently, farmers are restricted to selling their produce at mandis or market committees that charge various taxes on producers.
• Sources said an online platform would be set up wherein farmers will be able to sell and buy fruits, vegetables and other produce from across the country.
• An agency would be set up to oversee online trading and to ensure that transactions take place smoothly, they said.
• It will also focus on creating godowns and facilitating transportation of the farm produce after the online trade, sources added.
• The move is expected to give choice to farmers to sell the farm produce both in physical mandis or online platform.

• The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India on 30 June 2015 released the data on disabled population by type of disability, type of households and sex – 2011.
• The data gives the number of households having disabled persons by type of households including normal, institutional and houseless households.
• There are 207.8 lakh households having disabled persons in the country constituting 8.3 percent of the total households.
• Out of the total households having disabled persons, about 99 percent households are normal households, 0.4 percent are institutional and 0.2 percent are houseless households.
• Total households having disabled persons show an increase of 20.5 lakhs, from 187.3 lakhs in 2001 to 207.8 lakhs in 2011 (6.2 lakhs in rural and 14.3 lakhs in urban).
• Normal households increased by 2024495 institutional households by 8370 and houseless households by 13560 during the decade 2001-11.
• Disabled persons in normal households increased by 4819382 institutional households by 65895 and houseless households by 22948 during the said decade.
• The State/Union Territory with maximum disabled population is Uttar Pradesh and is followed by Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.
• The State/Union Territory with minimum disabled population is Lakshadweep and is preceded by Daman and Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli.

• Greece on 30 June 2015 became the first developed nation to default on International Monetary Fund (IMF) debt. It became a defaulter after it missed the deadline for payment of 1.7 billion dollar (1.5 billion euro) to IMF.
• The Eurozone Finance Ministers refused to extend its bailout to Greece after it rejected the proposal given by the troika viz., International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission (EC) and European Central Bank (ECB). The proposal said that Greece needs to raise its primary surplus within two years in order to avail the 15.5 billion Euros of funding, which in turn required pension and tax reforms for which the Syriza government is reluctant to.
• However, the ministers said that they will discuss a last-minute request from Greece for a new two-year bailout on 1 July 2015. The last country to do so was Zimbabwe in 2001.

• For the first time, the United Nations today issued a new joint guidance for countries to address the health risks posed by heatwaves that have become more frequent and deadlier over the last 50 years, recently killing over 3,000 people in India and Pakistan.
• The World Health Organisation (WHO) and World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) joined forces to issue guidelines on Heat-Health Warning Systems that will help contain the heatwaves that have turned out to be more hazardous due to climate change.
• Over the past 50 years, hot days, hot nights and heatwaves have become more frequent. The length, frequency and intensity of heatwaves will likely increase over most land areas during this century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
• Currently, there is no universally-accepted definition of a heatwave and no absolute universal value, such as a given temperature that defines what is extreme heat.

• Cuba has become the first country in the world to eliminate the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mother to baby, the WHO said, hailing the success as "one of the greatest public health achievements possible."
• "This is a major victory in our long fight against HIV and sexually transmitted infections, and an important step towards having an AIDS-free generation," said Dr Margaret Chan, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General.
• Every year, globally, an estimated 1.4 million women living with HIV become pregnant. Untreated, they have a 15-45 per cent chance of transmitting the virus to their children during pregnancy, labour, delivery or breastfeeding.
• However, that risk drops to just over 1 per cent if antiretroviral medicines are given to both mothers and children throughout the stages when infection can occur.
• The number of children born annually with HIV has almost halved since 2009 - down from 400,000 in 2009 to 240,000 in 2013, WHO said.
• But intensified, efforts will be required to reach the global target of less than 40,000 new child infections per year by 2015, it said.

• In Indonesia, a military transport plane Hercules C130 on 30 June 2015 crashed in a residential city of Medan, on the northern island of Sumatra. The plane hit two houses and a hotel before bursting into flames.
• It is believed that all 113 people on board were killed. Many of the passengers are thought to have been relatives of servicemen and women.
• The accident occurred when the Hercules transport plane was on its way from an air force base in Medan to Tanjung Pinang in Sumatra.

• 1983 batch Indian Police Service officer Jagmohan Yadav was on 30 June 2015 appointed as the Director General of Police (DGP) of Uttar Pradesh. He is the 8th police chief of Uttar Pradesh in the last three-and-a-half years of the Samajwadi Party (SP) rule.
• He succeeded AK Jain who retired as DGP on 30 June 2015. Jain, in reality, retired on 31 March 2015 but was given three months extension by the state government.
• The 1983 batch IPS officer will have tenure of six months before his retirement. Yadav was earlier posted as Director General, Criminal Investigation Department (CBCID).

• Grandmaster and former world junior champion Abhijeet Gupta won the Commonwealth Chess Championship after settling for a quick draw with Arghyadip Das in the ninth and final round here on Tuesday.
• Gupta regained the crown with an impressive eight points out of a possible nine, winning the first seven games in the championship and drawing the last two with utmost ease.
• Das finished second ahead of M.R. Lalith Babu.
• In the women’s section, Padmini Rout clinched gold followed by S. Vijayalakshmi (silver) and S. Meenakshi. Both Vijayalakshmi and Meenakshi won their last six games in the event.

• Matti Makkonen, the man responsible for conceiving the idea of short messaging service (SMS) technology, died on 30 June 2015 following a brief illness. He was 63.
• This Finnish tech pioneer pitched the idea of SMS messaging to two colleagues in a pizzeria while at a telecommunications conference in 1984. However, it was on 3 December 1992 that the first text message was sent from a computer to a mobile device via the Vodafone network.
• Unfortunately, Makkonen was not able to patent the invention of SMS messaging as it was only a conceived idea back in 1984. Though, he won The Economist's Innovation Award in 2008 in the computing and telecommunications category for his work on SMS.

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