Current Affairs Assam – June 2018
( Covers all important Assam Current Affairs & GK topics for the month of June 2018 )
June 2018 – eBook Monthly PDF | June 2018 Quiz
Go To Assam Current Affairs Go To Assam Current Affairs Quiz
June 10
India, China Sign MoUs to share Brahmaputra hydrological data and import of rice
China agreed to provide India hydrological data of the Brahmaputra River in flood season, months after Beijing stopped the practice, crucial to predict floods in Assam and other northeastern areas of India.
The two countries also signed an agreement under which China has agreed to import non-Basmati rice from India which is likely to bridge the ballooning trade deficit to a certain extent.
The two Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) were signed after a detailed discussions between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping on bilateral and global issues.
FACTFILE – About the two MoU
- The first MoU was inked between China’s Ministry of Water Resources and India’s Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation upon provision of hydrological information of the Brahmaputra river in flood season by China to India.
- The second MoU was signed between China’s General Administration of Customs and India’s Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare on Phytosanitary requirements for exporting rice, especially non-Basmati rice, from India to China, one of the world’s biggest rice markets.
India ranks 137th on Global Peace Index 2018
India has moved up four places to the 137th rank among 163 countries on the 2018 Global Peace Index. It is mainly due to a reduction in the level of violent crime driven by increased law enforcement.
Iceland remains the most peaceful and Syria, the least peaceful country in the world.
FACTFILE – Global Peace Index 2018
- Global Peace Index (GPI) measures the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness.
- The GPI is a report produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) and developed in consultation with data collected and collated by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
- The Index was first launched in May 2007, is the first study to rank countries around the world according to their peacefulness.
- The GPI gauges global peace using three broad themes: the level of societal safety and security, the extent of ongoing domestic and international conflict and the degree of militarization.
- Long-term findings of the 2017 GPI include a less peaceful world over the past decade, a 2.14 per cent deterioration in the global level of peace in the past decade, growing inequality in peace between the most and least peaceful countries, a long-term reduction in the GPI Militarization domain, and a widening impact of terrorism.
TOP 10 Peaceful Countries
- Iceland
- New Zealand
- Austria
- Portugal
- Denmark
- Canada
- Czech Republic
- Singapore
- Japan
- Ireland
RITES to buy 25% stake in IRSDC for ₹250 crore
The board of Public sector enterprise RITES Ltd has approved the decision to buy 25% stake for ₹250 crore in Indian Railway Station Development Corp. Ltd, (IRSDC), the company tasked with redeveloping 600 railway stations across the country.
FACTFILE – Indian Railway Station Development Corp. Ltd, (IRSDC)
- IRSDC is a joint venture company between IRCON (a government undertaking under ministry of railways) and Rail Land Development Authority (RLDA) (a statutory authority under ministry of railways) with a stake of 51:49.
- However, in September, during IRSDC’s annual general meeting a decision was taken to sell 1% of IRCON’s stake to RLDA for about ₹40 lakh to make it a equal joint-venture.
- Railways plans to restructure IRSDC where four entities RLDA, IRCON, RITES and CONCOR, all under Indian Railways would have 25% stake each in IRSDC.
- The arrangement will help to provide more autonomy to IRSDC and get a capital of around Rs 1,000 crore to undertake station development.
New Steel Policy saved India Rs 5,000 crore forex
The rollout of National Steel Policy 2017 (NSP 2017) has saved India foreign exchange of Rs 5,000 crore.
Around 24 million tonnes of crude steel capacity was added during past four years. India also replaced Japan as the second largest steel producer this year.
FACTFILE – Steel Production in India
- Steel production capacity has increased from 110 MT in 2014-15 to 134 MT in 2017-18, while 7 MT was added in 2017.
- Indian steel sector has been growing at a compounded annual growth rate of about 5% over the past four years on account of improvement in the overall capacity utilization.
- During the 201617 financial year, India became net exporter of steel with significant export of 8.2 MT registering 102% growth over previous fiscal.
- The exports from 5.6 MT in FY15 rose to 9.6 MT in FY18.
- The imports have declined by 36% from a level of 11.7 MT in FY16 to 7.5 MT in FY18.
FACTFILE – The National Steel Policy 2017 (NSP 2017)
- The National Steel Policy 2017 is an effort to enhance the steel industry to achieve its full potential, enhance steel production with focus on high end value added steel while being globally competitive.
- The policy also envisages to domestically meet the entire demand of high grade automotive steel, electrical steel, special steels and alloys for strategic applications and increase domestic availability of washed coking coal.
- The New Steel Policy, 2017 aspires to achieve 300MT of steel-making capacity by 2030.
- New Steel Policy seeks to increase per capita steel consumption to the level of 160 Kgs by 2030 from existing level of around 60 Kg.
- Policy stipulates that adoption of energy efficient technologies in the MSME steel sector will be encouraged to improve the overall productivity & reduce energy intensity.
- Steel Ministry will facilitate R&D in the sector through the establishment of Steel Research and Technology Mission of India (SRTMI).
Industry expects 8% GDP growth during the next two years
According to CII report, Indian Industry is expecting the GDP to grow by close to 8% over the next couple of years, as strong reforms process and fiscal prudence have laid a solid foundation for growth.
A CEOs (chief executive officers) opinion poll showed that 82% of them expect GDP (gross domestic product) growth to be higher than 7% for the year 2018-19, with 10% of them expecting growth to be above 7.5%.
FACTFILE – Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)
- The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) works to create and sustain an environment conducive to the development of India, partnering industry, Government, and civil society, through advisory and consultative processes.
- Founded in 1895, CII is a non-government, not-for-profit, industry-led and industry-managed organization, playing a proactive role in India’s development process.
- It’s India’s premier business association has around 9000 members, from the private as well as public sectors, including SMEs and MNCs, and an indirect membership of over 300,000 enterprises from around 265 national and regional sectoral industry bodies
Point2Remember – Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all final goods and services produced in a period (quarterly or yearly) of time.
Nominal GDP estimates are commonly used to determine the economic performance of a whole country or region, and to make international comparisons.
SCO summit 2018 at Qingdao, to sign Qingdao Declaration
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with the heads of other member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), signed various agreements during the signing-in ceremony at the summit in China’s Qingdao city.
Agreements includes the Qingdao Declaration and agreements on security, economic cooperation and people-to-people exchanges during the ceremony, which was held at Qingdao International Convention Center on the final day of the 18th SCO summit.
This is the first SCO summit wherein both India and Pakistan are attending as full-time members, after India and Pakistan became full members of the organisation at Astana Summit in Kazakhstan in June last year.
The SCO was founded in Shanghai 17 years ago and it now accounts for nearly half of the world’s population and over 20 per cent of global GDP. It is by far the largest regional organisation in the world.
June 11
US made world’s most powerful Supercomputer ‘Summit’
US made world’s most powerful Supercomputer Summit by beating China. The United States regained its position of having the world’s most powerful supercomputer by beating China, after China made exceeded in possession of world’s most powerful supercomputer in June 2013.
The supercomputer name Summit can operate at 200 petaflops which translates to 200 quadrillion calculations per second. The China supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight was holding the record as it has the capability of operating at 93 petaflop capacity.
Recently India also unveiled its fastest supercomputer named ‘Pratyush‘. The government established a research Centre named High-Performance Computing facility at the Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune. This Indian Supercomputer is dedicated to calculating and forecasting the weather conditions, by stimulating the weather pattern and making the prediction.
FACTFILE – Summit or OLCF-4
- Summit is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which as of June 8, 2018 is the fastest supercomputer in the world.
- Its speed has been given as 200 petaflops and overtake the China supercomputer Sunway Taihulight having speed of 93 petaflops.
- It is developed with 4,608 servers, over 9,000 22-core IBM Power9 processors and more than 27,000 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
- Each node has over 500GB of coherent memory (high-bandwidth memory plus DDR4 SDRAM) which is addressable by all CPUs and GPUs plus 800GB of non-volatile RAM that can be used as a burst buffer or as extended memory.
- To provide a high rate of data throughput, the nodes will be connected in a non-blocking fat-tree topology using a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect for both storage and inter-process communications traffic which delivers both 200Gb/s bandwidth between nodes and in-network computing acceleration for communications frameworks such as MPI and SHMEM/PGAS.
RBI survey indicates Economy worsened since 2016
Reserve Bank of India survey conducted in six metropolitan cities, shows that 48% of the citizens believe that the Indian economy has worsened in 2018, when compared to the previous two years ago.
The survey was conducted in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi, to get responses on households’ perceptions and expectations on the general economic situation, employment scenario, overall price situation, income and spending. The number of people who believed the economy was in bad shape was only 30% in December 2016, but has seen a sharp jump in May 2018.
More than 44% believed the employment situation has worsened. In the previous survey in March this year, the number of people who believed employment prospects have taken a hit was a little less.
Over 88% felt that the general price level has increased and most of them expected it will keep increasing in the recent time.
India won 2018 Intercontinental Cup beating Kenya
India beat Kenya in Intercontinental Cup final held in Mumbai. In the final match, India secured a comfortable 2-0 victory over Kenya.
Indian captain Sunil Chhetri was the decisive factor yet again as he scored a brace to seal the victory for the Blue Tigers. Chhetri scored 8 goals in the 2018 Intercontinental Cup.
Point2Remember – Sunil Chhetri now goes level with Lionel Messi with 64 international goals to his name. The only active footballer with more international goals than Chhetri is Cristiano Ronaldo.
FACTFILE – 2018 Intercontinental Cup
- The 2018 Intercontinental Cup (known as the 2018 Hero Intercontinental Cup for sponsorship reasons[1]) is a 4-team association football tournament
- It was held at the Mumbai Football Arena in the Indian city of Mumbai between the 1st and 10th of June 2018.
- The tournament is organized by the AIFF as part of the senior men’s team’s preparation for 2019 AFC Asian Cup.
India to produce lithium-ion batteries
The government signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the Union ministry of science & technology and the CSIR-CECRI, for the transfer of technology for India’s first indigenously developed lithium-ion cells.
The technology was developed by Central Electro Chemical Research Institute (CECRI), Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu, in partnership with Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)-National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi; CSIR-Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute, Kolkata; and CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad.
Lithium ion batteries are currently sourced mainly from China, Japan and South Korea among other countries.
The technology developed by the CSIR labs can be used in solar cells, medical devices, electric vehicles, power backups, and powering robots.
India is one of the largest importers of these batteries. In 2017, India imported batteries worth nearly 150 million USD.
It will give tremendous boost to the two flagship programmes of the central government increasing the share of clean energy by generating 175 gigawatt by 2022, of which 100GW will be solar; and the second being switching completely to electric vehicles by 2030 under the National Electric Mobility Mission.
June 2018 – eBook Monthly PDF | June 2018 Quiz
Go To Assam Current Affairs Go To Assam Current Affairs Quiz
