Current Affairs Quiz - April, 2020

Notes:
Article-316 of our constitution explains about the appointment and term of office of members of the Union Public Service Commission. The President appoints the Chairman and the ten members of UPSC. The term of a member of UPSC is six years from the date he enters his office or until the age of sixty-five years.
Recently, the chairman and members of Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) have decided to give up 30 per cent of their basic pay for one year to the PM CARES fund and support the government in fighting Covid-19 pandemic.

Notes:
The province of Himachal Pradesh was organised on 15 April 1948, after its 28 princely states, which were called as the Simla Hills States and four Punjab southern hill states, were integrated. To commemorate the foundation of the state, April 15 is being celebrated every year as ‘Himachal Day’.
Himachal Pradesh was originally classified as a Union territory in 1956. It was created as the 18th state of India in 1971. The first Chief Minister of the state was Dr. Yashwant Singh Parmar.

Notes:
The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), headquartered at Geneva, Switzerland recently directed the Government of India to carry out effective measures to ensure a minimum adequate standard of living to the migrant workers, who are largely affected by the Covid-19 lockdown.
India has imposed a nation-wide lockdown from March 25 to April 14 earlier and has been extended to May 3 to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The organisation also highlighted that due to the massive internal displacement 22 internal migrant workers and their family members have died.

Notes:
Order books, inventories and capacity utilisation survey (OBICUS), is the flagship survey conducted by the Reserve Bank of India. It is a quarterly survey of the manufacturing sector, which has been conducted by the RBI since 2008.
Recently, the country’s central bank released the 49th round of the OBICUS survey for the period January-March 2020. The survey collects information on the new orders received, backlog of orders, finished goods, etc. As per the recent survey, both capacity utilisation and orders received declined.

Notes:
The Centre has recently decided to waive four months’ rent of small IT units based in the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI).
The total cost of the rent waiver to the units, which are either MSMEs or start-ups, for four months, is estimated to be around ₹5 crore. STPI, which has 60 centres across the country, is an autonomous society under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Notes:
The Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar has recently launched a mobile application named ‘Kisan Rath’, for better transportation of perishable agricultural goods during lockdown.
Developed by the National Informatics, the mobile application assists the farmers to find transport facility. The app is expected to include as many as 5 lakh trucks and 20,000 tractors in the chain, to transport the agricultural goods to markets. Recently, a nation-wide call centre has also been launched for the same purpose.

Notes:
The United Nation has six official languages namely Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. It celebrates special days for all the languages to celebrate multilingualism and promote the usage of all languages in the organisation.
Chinese was established as an official language of the UN in 1946. April 20 is celebrated as the Chinese Day. The date of the Chinese day is selected to honour and pay tribute to Cangjie, who is claimed to be the inventor of Chinese characters. The people of China celebrate the day of Guyu to commemorate Cangjei.

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India recently notified that it has decided to revise Ways and Means Advances (WMA) for the period of April 2020 to September 2020, to Rs 2 lakh crore. The limit has been extended from the previous limit of Rs. 1.2 lakh crore.
Ways and Means advances, WMA is a mechanism by which state governments receive short-term funding from the Reserve Bank of India, which is to be repaid in 3 months. The funds are used for balancing temporary mismatches and are usually granted at the repo rate.

Notes:
Union Finance Minister of India Nirmala Sitharaman participated in the 5th Annual Meeting of Board of Governors of New Development Bank (NDB).
The Finance Minister also appreciated the efforts of NDB in granting an emergency financial assistance of about $5 billion to BRICS countries including an assistance of $1 billion to India, for fighting the coronavirus pandemic. The Minister also suggested to upgrade the assistance to $10 billion.

Notes:
The United Nations designated 21 April as World Creativity and Innovation Day, to raise awareness about the role of creativity and innovation in overall human development.
As per the Creative Economy report titled “Widening local development pathways”, jointly published by UNESCO, UNDP and UN Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC), Creativity and innovation are the true wealth of nations in the 21st century.