Current Affairs Quiz - March, 2019

Notes:
On Feb 26, the former England opener Alastair Cook has officially received the knighthood for his services to cricket by the Queen in an official ceremony at the Buckingham Palace. He is the first English cricketer to get the honour since Sir Ian Botham in 2007. Overall, Cook is the 11th Englishman to be knighted for services to cricket. Cook, who made his Test debut in 2006 against India, captained England for a record 59 Test matches and led the country to 24 wins in the longest format of the game. He has appeared in a total of 160 Tests for the national side. He retired from the Test cricket following the five-match series against India in September 2018.

Notes:
Eminent Indian playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar has been chosen for the 2019 META Lifetime Achievement Award. He will be conferred upon with the award on March 12, along with the winners of the 14th Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) festival. Elkunchwar is critically-acclaimed and widely-known for having experimented with a wide range of drama and is considered a powerful force in both Indian and Marathi theatre scene. He has over 30 plays and essays to his credit including works like ‘Sultan’, ‘Holi’, ‘Garbo’, ‘Yatanaghar’, and ‘Atmakatha’. His 1985 play ‘Wada Chirebandi’ (Old Stone Mansion) has been staged in Marathi, Hindi and Bengali, besides being adapted for television.

Notes:
Suresh Raina has become the first Indian batsman to cross 8000 runs in T20 cricket. He achieved this feat when he scored 12 runs against Puducherry in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy at Delhi on Feb 25. With those 12 runs, Raina has now scored 8,001 from 300 T20s which consisted of 284 innings. It was incidentally his 300th T20. Beside this, Raina is the second Indian after MS Dhoni to have played 300 T20 matches. Apart from Raina, Virat Kohli (7833) and Rohit Sharma (7795) are the only other batsmen in the top 10 list of the highest run-getters in T20 cricket. Overall, Raina is the sixth highest with David Warner (8111 runs), Shoaib Malik (8603), Kieron Pollard (8839), Brendon McCullum (9922) and Chris Gayle (12,298).

Notes:
The West Bengal government has launched ‘Banglar Shiksha’ portal to provide real-time data on state-run and aided schools. The portal, ”Banglar Shiksha” (banglarshiksha.gov.in), will store real-time data of 1.5 crore students, 5 lakh teachers and 1 lakh schools. It will be operated on a trial basis for two months to remove glitches, if any and will be fully functional by 1st May 2019. The system will enable the headmaster and class teacher to access the academic performance of a student. Parents, too, can access the information by downloading the Banglar Shiksha app.

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Bank of Japan (BOJ) have signed a Bilateral Swap Arrangement (BSA) for $75 billion that will help in bringing greater stability in foreign exchange and capital markets in the country. The pact will enables both countries to swap their local currencies (i.e., either Japanese yen or Indian rupee) against US dollar for up to $75 billion. The BSA was negotiated between India and Japan during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Tokyo on October 29, 2018. With this, India can access the agreed amount of $75 billion for its domestic currency, for the purpose of maintaining an appropriate level of balance of payments or short-term liquidity.

Notes:
West Indies opener Chris Gayle has become the first-ever player to smash 500 sixes in international cricket. He achieved this feat in the ongoing 5-match One Day International (ODI) series against England at National Cricket Stadium in Grenada, West Indies on 27 February. However, Gayle’s fireworks weren’t enough to help his team cross the line as West Indies were bowled out for 389. They fell 29 runs short of England’s 418/6, scored courtesy Jos Buttler’s 150 and Eoin Morgan’s 103 as well as half-centuries by Jonny Bairstow and Alex Hales. Earlier in the ongoing series, he had toppled Shahid Afridi to record the most number of sixes by any batsman in international cricket. Gayle, who will retire from ODIs after the 2019 Cricket World Cup, now has 506 sixes in international cricket (98 in Tests, 305 in ODIs and 103 in T20Is). He also breached 10,000-run mark in ODIs and become only the 2nd from West Indies after Brian Lara (10,405 runs) to achieve the milestone.

Notes:
On Feb 28, Union Minister for Textiles Smriti Zubin Irani launched a comprehensive programme for the development of knitting and knitwear sector in the country under the PowerTex India scheme in New Delhi. The total outlay for the knitwear scheme is Rs. 47.72 crore & would be in operation till March 31, 2020.The programme for knitting and knitwear units, catering to domestic and exports markets, has 8 components where the industries would get support to install machinery under group work shed scheme, buy yarn, go in for solar energy, have common facilities and create new service centres under public private partnership mode. The scheme envisages creation of new service centres on Public Private Partnership (PPP) model by industry and association in the knitting and knitwear clusters. Some of the major knitwear clusters in the country are Tiruppur, Ludhiana, Kanpur, and Kolkata.

Notes:
On the occasion of National Science Day (NSD-2019), the Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister, Prakash Javadekar launched Rs 250 Crore scheme ‘STARS’ to fund 500 science projects. The selection of these projects would be done on the basis of competitions.The project will be coordinated by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Interested candidates will have to submit applications to take part in the competition. The applications will release on the first week of April 2019. The acronym of STARS stands for “Scheme for Translational and Advanced Research”. Beside this, the HRD Ministry in collaboration with the National Skill Ministry and Labour and employment Ministry collaboratively launched SHREYAS – Scheme for Higher Education Youth for Apprenticeship and Skills to empower non-technical courses.

Notes:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently addressed the Construction Technology India 2019 conference on ‘Global Housing Technology Challenge’, in New Delhi. Here, PM Modi declared the 2019-2020 as the Year of construction technology in a bid to increase the use of modern technology in the construction sector. The purpose of the 2-day conference was to identify innovative and globally established technologies that can be used in the Indian context. In the event, developers, academia, technology providers, researchers etc. participated. Those technologies which are identified during the conference will be invited to design and build lighthouse projects of around one thousand housing units each in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh.

Notes:
Indian Air Force Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman will be honoured with the first-ever ‘Bhagwan Mahavir Ahimsa Puraskar’, which is instituted by the Akhil Bharatiya Digambar Jain Mahasamiti. The award carries a cash prize of Rs 2.51 lakh, a memento and a citation and will be presented to Varthaman on 17th April 2019, coinciding with Mahavir Jayanti. In the ongoing India-Pakistan standoff, Varthaman was held for three days under captivity in Pakistan after his Mig-21 Bison aircraft was shot down in an aerial dogfight. He shot down a Pakistani Air Force F-16 before he was forced to eject and landed across the Line of Control (LoC). He was captured by Pakistan forces soon after and was released on March 1.