Current Affairs Update – 20th May, 2015

Hello and welcome to ExamPundit. Here are the important current affairs of 20th May, 2015.

• State Bank of India today signed a Memorandum of
  Understanding (MoU) with e-commerce player Amazon to develop payment and
  commerce solutions for customers and small businesses.
• “Amazon is a very large company in the digital commerce
  space. We have a very large group of customers who could benefit by getting
  connected with this platform. The idea of the MoU is that we can try and give
  customers a good experience in both buying and selling,” SBI Chairman
  Arundhati Bhattacharya told reporters here today.
• She said the bank is working on ways to enrich customers’
  payment experience and opening up the windows of e-commerce to its SME
  customers through this tie-up.
• Amazon India Vice President and Country Manager Amit Agarwal
  said, “In SBI, we have a fantastic partner whom customers and businesses
  trust through long-standing relationships, sometimes over generations.
  Moreover, SBI shares Amazon’s philosophy of building customer trust and
  investing for the long term.”
• The SBI, country’s largest lender, will also provide loans
  to SME customers who supply products to Amazon to help them increase their
  operations.

• Actor Amitabh Bachchan and his family has invested in
  Ziddu.com, a Singapore-based Web site owned by Meridian Tech Pte Ltd.
• Though the size of the deal is not divulged, the firm said
  that the deal is based on a valuation of $71 million.
• Founded by Venkata Srinivas Meenavalli, Meridian Tech Pte is
  a free cloud storage and micro payment platform. It is rated among the top five
  file sharing sites in the world.
• The firm says it has 1.2 billion page views with more than
  300 million visitors a month.

• India’s three metropolitan cities, Kolkata, Mumbai and
  Bangalore, have emerged as the top three fastest growing cities in A T
  Kearney’s Global Cities Index, which is topped by New York and London.
• The three cities have been improving their scores steadily
  in business activity, information exchange, human capital and cultural
  experience – key parameters used to measure a city’s global engagement in the
  index released today, said the London-based global management consulting group.
• The three India cities have made particularly strong
  improvements in information exchange, in part due to gains in the number of broadband
  subscribers, it said.
• The GCI provides a unique assessment of global engagement
  for 125 cities, measuring how globally engaged each city is across 26 metrics
  in five dimensions — Business Activity, Human Capital, Information Exchange,
  Cultural Experience, and Political Engagement.
• The GCO is new this year: It evaluates the future potential
  of 125 cities based on the rate of change across four dimensions — Personal
  Well-being, Economics, Innovation, and Governance.
• For the GCO, cities in India and China are the ones to
  watch, especially Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Beijing.
• New York and London remain the world’s most global cities,
  as they are the only cities to rank in the top 10 of both GCI and GCO.

• The state government of Delhi on 19 May 2015 decided to
  launch Pay & Play Scheme at the designated stadiums or sports complexes.
  The scheme is planned to promote sports for all age groups in the national
  capital.
• The scheme would begin from 1 July 2015 in the morning
  session from 6 am to 9.30 am. The facilities would be free of cost for school
  students and disabled persons.
• Under the scheme, people can play game available within the
  stadiums and complexes by paying a nominal fee of 100 rupees per month.

• India and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)
  on 15 May 2015 signed an ODA (Official Development Assistance) loan agreement
  to provide up to 21787 million yen (about 1165 crore rupees) for the Odisha
  Transmission System Improvement Project (OTSIP).
• The agreement was signed by Joint Secretary in the Union
  Ministry of Finance S Selvakumar and JICA India Office Chief Representative
  Shinya Ejima in New Delhi.
• The purpose of the loan is to assist in establishing a
  stable power supply to the state in advance of an expected large increase in
  power demand in the coming years due to rapid industrialization.

• Pink city Jaipur is embarking on the path of digitisation to
  transform itself into a smart city over the next few years, with the help of
  technology giant Cisco.
• As part of the process, Jaipur Development Authority (JDA)
  is drawing a blueprint that is expected to complete by the end of July and has
  partnered Cisco for its expertise in the segment.
• The Indian government plans to develop 100 smart cities by
  2022. In the Budget, Finance Ministry had allocated Rs. 7,060 crore for
  developing these smart cities.
• Governments across the world are keen on setting up smart
  cities, where technology can help people access, in real time, infrastructure
  services like traffic, parking, lighting, and water.

• Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won Britain’s
  prestigious Man Booker International prize for his achievement in fiction as he
  edged out India’s Amitav Ghosh and eight others to bag the top literary award.
• Chair of judges Marina Warner, an academic and writer,
  compared Krasznahorkai’s work to Franz Kafka — Krasznahorkai’s own personal
  literary hero — and Beckett.
• Krasznahorkai was one of 10 writers shortlisted for this
  year’s award, alongside authors including Ghosh, Libya’s Ibrahim al-Koni,
  Mozambique’s Mia Couto and America’s Fanny Howe.
• Kolkata-born, 58-year-old Ghosh had also missed out on the
  prize in 2008 when he was shortlisted for his work Sea of Poppies.
• Krasznahorkai’s first novel Satantango was published to huge
  acclaim in Hungary in 1985 and was later adapted for a cinema by filmmaker Bela
  Tarr in collaboration with the author.
• He followed it with 1989’s The Melancholy of Resistance,
  published in English in 1998, in which violent hysteria follows the arrival of
  a circus with a dead whale in a small Hungarian town. It won the German
  Bestenliste prize for the best literary work of the year.

• SS Ahluwalia was on 18 May 2015 appointed as the chairman of
  Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Right to Fair Compensation and
  Transparency in Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR)
  (Amendment) Bill, 2015.
• The committee has 20 members from the Lok Sabha and 10
  members from the Rajya Sabha.
• The formation of the panel became necessary in the backdrop
  of disagreement among the political parties on the provisions of the bill which
  was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 11 May 2015.
• The committee will submit its report by the first week of
  the 2015 monsoon session.

• Sidelined for more than two years, off-spinner Harbhajan
  Singh on Wednesday returned to India’s Test squad for the cricket tour of
  Bangladesh.
• Contrary to speculation about top players being rested, the
  five-member selection panel headed by Sandeep Patil decided to go with full
  strength squads for both the one off Test and the three ODIs starting June 10.
• Harbhajan last played a Test for India in March 2013 against
  Australia in a home series. The 34-year-old is the third highest Test
  wicket-taker for India with 413 scalps to his credit in 101 matches.

• ODIs: Mahendra
  Singh Dhoni (c), Rohit Sharma, Ajinkya Rahane, Shikhar Dhawan, Virat Kohli,
  Suresh Raina, Ambati Rayudu, R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel, Bhuvneshwar
  Kumar, Umesh Yadav, Mohit Sharma, Stuart Binny, Dhawal Kulkarni.
• Tests: Virat
  Kohli (c), Murali Vijay, Shikhar Dhawan, K L Rahul, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya
  Rahane, Rohit Sharma, Wriddhimaan Saha, R Ashwin, Harbhajan Singh, Karn Sahrma,
  Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Umesh Yadav, Varun Aaron, Ishant Sharma.

• Popular Indian stage, film and television actress Sudha
  Shivpuri died on 20 May 2015 due to multiple organ failure at a suburban hospital
  in Andheri. She was 77.
• Now, she is survived by her son Vineet and daughter Ritu,
  who is an actress. She was married to veteran bollywood actor Om Shivpuri, who
  passed away on 15 October 1990.
• Shivpuri gained popularity for her role as Baa in television
  show Kyuki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, the longest running TV show of Ekta Kapoor.
• In 2009, Sudha Shivpuri was conferred with the Sangeet Natak
  Akademi Award.

• Eminent economist, noted academic and policy advisor Mrinal
  Datta Chaudhuri, who bewitched and inspired generations of students at the
  Delhi School of Economics with his lively lectures on an ostensibly arid
  subject, passed away at his Pune residence on Tuesday aged 81.
• ‘MDC’ as Professor
  Chaudhuri was popularly and affectionately called, studied with Nobel Laureate
  Amartya Sen in Shantiniketan and furthered his education at Kolkata’s
  Presidency College before completing his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute
  of Technology (MIT) where he studied modern economics under the legendary Paul
  Samuelson, whom Dr. Chaudhuri personally regarded as “the greatest economist of
  the 20th century”.
• A major influence on planning through his numerous prescient
  papers, Dr. Chaudhuri’s works had an enormous impact on former Prime Minister
  Dr. Manmohan Singh.
• A particularly noteworthy paper he authored pertained to the
  challenges of economic reform in the context of both State and market failures
  in 1990, just before the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union and India’s lurch
  towards globalization.

Regards

Team ExamPundit

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