Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 18 September 2016

:: National ::

Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrated his 66th birthday with tribals in central Gujarat, where he announced several irrigation schemes, and he distributed assistive devices and kits to over 11000 specially abled persons.
In the tribal district of Dahod, the Prime Minister announced several water supply and lift irrigation projects worth Rs 4800 crore under the Gujarat government's Vanbandhu Kalyan Yojna.
In Navsari, the Prime Minister distributed kits and assistive devices such as wheelchairs and hearing aids to specially abled persons.
According to Mr Modi, previous governments held only 57 camps for divyangs while the NDA government held 4,000 in only two years.

Niti Aayog will start ranking States on outcomes in social sectors such as healthcare, water and education from next month.
"If 39 per cent of the population is stunted and nutrition is poor, you can’t move up the ladder and will lose the advantage of a young demographic,” Mr. Kant said.
The Centre’s think tank is finalising new indices to track the States’ performance on parameters pertaining to education, water and health sectors.
"India has done a lot on access to education, but quality of education is extremely poor. Our Class V student is not able to do addition and subtraction. Our Class II students can’t read their mother tongue,” he said.

A young Iraqi woman, who survived trafficking at the hands of the Islamic State (IS), has been appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the dignity of survivors of human trafficking.
Nadia Murad Basee Taha (23), a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, is the Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
The appointment marks the first time a survivor of atrocities is bestowed with this distinction.
Ms. Murad had briefed the UN Security Council in its first-ever session on human trafficking in December last year. She described being rounded up with fellow Yazidis in Iraq in 2014.
A relentless advocate for victims, Ms. Murad was recently named one of Time magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential People of 2016.’

The government is working overtime to meet the stiff April 2017 deadline for rolling out the Goods and Service Tax (GST) regime and it remains a “challenge,” Cabinet Secretary P.K. Sinha said.
“The government has been working overtime recently and has taken some path-breaking steps in making governance efficient, transparent, responsive, participatory and accountable,” he said.
“In fact, I can even say a silent revolution is under way as we move towards a completely digital architecture towards governance in all fields.”
The government is thinking of various measures to promote cargo transport on waterways, cargo movement has already begun on the national waterway from Varanasi to Howrah and is proving to be more cost-efficient that road and rail.
Addition of new railway lines and electrification has been expedited and passenger traffic is growing at more than 20 per cent in the civil aviation sector, giving the Railways ‘stiff competition,’.

Ahead of the SAARC Summit in Islamabad, it is business as usual for the regional grouping.
Union Finance Ministry has posted a call for applications for economy, infrastructure and social development posts in the umbrella financial mechanism for the region’s projects and programmes, the SAARC Development Fund.
The openings include the jobs of the Directors of the Fund’s three funding windows: Social, Economic and Infrastructure. They will be located in the Fund’s Secretariat in Thimphu, Bhutan.
The Fund’s Economic and Infrastructure windows are in the process of being operationalised. Bankable projects for lending in the region are under evaluation.
The Economic Window is expected to extend funding to non-infrastructural projects related to areas such as trade and industrial development and agriculture.
Under the Social window, the Fund is already implementing ten regional projects.
The focus of most of these projects is on poverty alleviation, education; health; human resources development; support to the disadvantaged; funding needs of communities, mirco-enterprises and rural infrastructure development.
The Infrastructure Window will finance projects in areas such as energy, power, transportation, telecommunications, environment, tourism and other infrastructure sectors.
The programme was expected to result in greenhouse gases emission mitigation of around 5.5 million tons of CO2-equivalent annually and 5,700 million KWh of energy savings during 2012-2015.