Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2019

Notes:
On August 1, East Bengal club has officially started the centenary celebrations on its foundation day with a glittering ceremony at the Netaji Indoor Stadium. On this occasion, the iconic football club awarded its highest honour – Bharat Gaurav – to India’s first cricket World Cup-winning captain Kapil Dev. Kapil is no stranger to football as he had donned the club’s colours in an exhibition match against Mohun Bagan in 1992. Kapil is no stranger to football as he had donned the club’s colours in an exhibition match against Mohun Bagan in 1992.

Notes:
The Department of Revenue under the Ministry of Finance is conducting India’s first national Time Release Study (TRS) between 1st – 7th August to enable faster movement of cargo across borders to benefit traders. The exercise will be institutionalized on an annual basis, during the same period every year hereafter. The TRS is an internationally recognized tool advocated by World Customs Organization (WCO) to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of international trade flows. This initiative will be conducted at the same time across 15 ports including sea, air, land and dry ports which cumulatively account for 81% of total Bills of Entries for import and 67% of Shipping Bills for export filed within India. The national TRS will establish baseline performance measurement and have standardized operations and procedures across all ports. Based on the results of the TRS, government agencies associated with cross border trade will be able to diagnose existing and potential bottlenecks which act as barriers to the free flow of trade, and take remedial actions for reducing the cargo release time. The initiative is on ground lead by the Central Board of Indirect Tax and Customs.

Notes:
On August 3, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani launched the ‘Vhali Dikri Yojna’ in Rajkot for the welfare of girl child. It is a statewide cash incentive scheme for every girl child born in Gujarat, with a view to raising the female birthrate at par with male to achieve gender equality. According to scheme, the State Government will pay Rs. 4,000 to every girl child at the time of admission to Standard 4th, Rs. 6,000 at the time of taking admission to Standard IX, Rs. 1-lakh at the time of taking admission for higher education at the age of 18 and another Rs. 1-lakh at the time of marriage. Approx, Rs.133-crore has been allocated for this scheme.

Notes:
The University Grants Commission (UGC) has recommended the grant of the Institute of Eminence (IoE) status to 20 institutions such as IITs Madras and Kharagpur, Delhi University, University of Hyderabad, Amritha Vishwa Vidyapeetham and VIT. The recommendations are based on the reports of the Empowered Expert Committee (EEC) under the chairmanship of N Gopalaswami. The aim of Institute of Eminence (IoE) scheme is to develop 20 world-class institutions which would put India on the global education map. Those selected will be given greater autonomy and freedom to decide fees, course durations and governance structures. The public institutions will also receive a government grant of Rs 1,000 crore, while the private institutions will not get any funding under the scheme.

Notes:
A research team at IIT Kharagpur has developed a technology which can generate energy from solid waste with high moisture content. The new technology – Hydro Thermal Carbonization (HTC) – can convert municipal solid waste to biofuel, soil amendment and absorbents. The technology converts organic fraction of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) into Hydrochar by using a batch reactor. The moisture in the waste is used to the advantage of the process which uses water for the reaction. The process has increased the resource recovery yield to 50-65% of urban organic waste. The key to the success of the technology lies in designing a proper industrial-scale HTC reactor with improved heat integration system.

Notes:
Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty have become the first Indian pair to win a BWF Super 500 badminton tournament. They beat World champions Li Jun Hui and Liu Yu Chen of China in the summit clash of Thailand Open 21-19, 18-21, 21-18 in Bangkok to win the men’s doubles category.

Notes:
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has launched India’s first large-scale trial for two new TB vaccines – VPM1002 and Immuvac. The initiative would enroll 12,000 healthy household contacts of a patient whose sputum has tested positive for TB and are therefore at high risk of contracting the disease. VPM1002 is produced by the Serum Institute of India (Pune) & Immuvac is manufactured by Cadila Pharmaceuticals. These anti-Tuberculosis vaccines aim to prevent infection (pre-exposure) or prevent primary progression or reactivation of latent TB infection (post-exposure). According to the Global TB Report 2017 issued by the World Health Organization (WHO), India has the highest number of TB cases in the world.

Notes:
The UN International Day of Friendship is celebrated across the globe every year on July 30 to observe the importance of friendship in promoting peace in many cultures. The day is based on the recognition of the relevance and importance of friendship as a noble and valuable sentiment in the lives of human beings around the world. However, India celebrates Friendship Day on the first Sunday of August.

Notes:
Maharashtra has become the India’s first state to adopt a digital fingerprint and iris scanning system – Automated Multi-modal Biometric Identification System (AMBIS) – to aid police investigations. This system will soon be replicated by other state police forces across the country. An AMBIS unit consists of a computer terminal, a camera, and iris, fingerprint, and palm scanners. It also includes a portable system to dust off and capture fingerprints from crime scenes. With the integration of the system with facial recognition from CCTV cameras, AMBIS enables the police to cross-reference and put faces to criminals whose fingerprints have been captured on paper over the decades, apart from solving fresh crimes. This new system has replaced the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which has been used by Indian law enforcement agencies to search finger and palm prints.

Notes:
Former Indian opener and Bengal captain, Arun Lal has been conferred with Karthik Bose Lifetime Achievement award of the Cricket Association of Bengal’s (CAB’s) in Kolkata. He played 16 Test matches and 13 One-Day Internationals (ODIs) for India between 1982 and 1989. He played six seasons for Delhi before becoming a regular feature for Bengal and was a major figure in Bengal’s Ranji Trophy triumph in 1989. He was credited with instilling a positive attitude in the team’s approach.