Monthly Current Affairs Quiz - June, 2017

Notes:
Asim Basu (81), the renowned theatre artiste and director, art director, painter and playwright, has recently passed away in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. He was known for his set design work in Ollywood movies and designing Oriya book covers and movie posters. He directed around 200 plays and did stage designing for over 500 plays and was the art director for several Odia films. Some of his major works are Indradhanura Chhai, Dadagiri and apana Banika.

Notes:
The ‘Mile Banche Madhya Pradesh (or Let us read together) programme has been held in all government schools of Madhya Pradesh. As part of the programme, over 1.26 lakh volunteers including MP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan besides pensioners, mediapersons, homemakers and other professionals played the role of a ‘teacher’ for a day in government-run schools on February 18, 2017. They read out a portion of any Hindi book. Along with this, they motivate children to read out any portion of their interest from any other book.

Notes:
The First Sherpas Meeting of the 9th BRICS Summit was held in Nanjing, the capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province, from February 23-24, 2017. The Sherpas Meeting discussed the priority areas for BRICS cooperation for this year, especially in the areas of political affairs, economy and culture, under the theme “BRICS: Stronger Partnership for a Brighter Future.” The meeting attracted more than 100 participants, including coordinators from all sides, foreign diplomats, and representatives from the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB).

Notes:
The Andhra Pradesh government has signed MoU with Visa to transform Vishakhapatnam into India’s first ‘less cash’ city. As per MoU, this initiative is designed to provide the foundation for the city to emerge as India’s ‘Fintech Valley’. For this, Visa will focus on driving payments digitisation, and work with the city to help build the talent pool required in city organisations and in academia on emerging technologies like blockchain. Visa will also provide support to FinTech start-ups by providing access to Visa’s APIs, providing subject matter expertise, and participating in boot camps and hackathons. The state government has also signed a MoU with Thomson Reuters for cooperation in Fintech initiatives in the state.

Notes:
India and Asian Development Bank (ADB) have signed 375 million pact for loans and grants to develop 800—km Visakhapatnam—Chennai Industrial Corridor, which is the first phase of a planned 2,500-km East Coast Economic Corridor. Apart from this, The Asian Development Bank has approved loans comprising a 500 million multitranche facility to build key infrastructure in the four main centers along the corridor — Visakhapatnam, Kakinada, Amaravati, and Yerpedu—Srikalahasti in Andhra Pradesh.

Notes:
The Haryana government has launched an online system “Sex Ratio Monitoring Dashboard” for Panipat to monitor the sex-ratio in the district as part of the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ programme. The dashboard had been developed in association with National Informatics Centre (NIC) as a pilot project. The online system will have the data of child sex-ratio collected from all villages by the Health and Women and Child Welfare Departments every month. It will also have the data on critical villages where more attention was required towards skewed child sex-ratio and steps needed to taken to set up the efforts accordingly.

Notes:
India’s GDP growth rate has been projected to 7% for FY17, as per latest survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In its Economic Survey of India (ESI), the Global think-tank has stated that demonetisation may have impacted short term growth but the long term effects would include important gains going forward. It suggested that India should bring down corporate tax rate from 30% to 25%. Beside this, OECD has also estimated India’s GDP growth rate to 7.3% for FY18 and 7.7% for FY19. The OECD is a global policy forum that promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.

Notes:
Robyn Rihanna Fenty, a Barbadian singer and songwriter, has been conferred with the 2017 Harvard Humanitarian of the Year award in recognition for her work to improve cancer treatment in her home country of Barbados and for setting up a college scholarship to bring Caribbean students to study in the United States. The annual award by the prestigious university is given to an individual whose works and deeds have served to improve the quality of lives and have inspired people to greater heights.

Notes:
The 13th edition of Economic Co-operation Organisation (ECO) summit was held in Islamabad, Pakistan on March 1, 2017. The purpose of the summit is to increase cooperation in areas such as trade, energy, tourism, economic growth and productivity. Ambassador Halil Ibrahim Akca from Turkey is the current Secretary General of ECO. The ECO was formed in 1985 by Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. It now also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

Notes:
Dr. Thomas Earl Starzl (90), the renowned American surgeon and expert on organ transplants, has recently passed away Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He performed the world’s first human liver transplant and has often been referred to as “the father of modern transplantation”. Since then, thousands of lives have been saved by the procedure. Beside this, he was also the driving force behind the world’s first baboon-to-human liver transplants and research on anti-rejection drugs.