Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 18 December 2016

:: National ::

In a surprise move, the government announced that Lt. Gen. Bipin Rawat will be the next Chief of Army Staff.
The appointment goes against the long-held tradition of appointing the senior-most eligible officer to the post.
By this criterion, Lt. Gen. Praveen Bakshi, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief Eastern Command, should have been appointed.
Air Marshal B.S. Dhanoa, now the Vice-Chief of the Indian Air Force (IAF), has been appointed the next Air Chief.
Lt. Gen. Bakshi is widely respected as a highly competent and professional officer.
The last time the senior-most eligible officer was not appointed was in 1983 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi chose to appoint Lt. Gen. A.S. Vaidya as the Chief, contrary to expectations that Lt. Gen. S.K. Sinha would take over.
Lt. Gen. Sinha, then Vice-Chief, chose to resign in June 1983 though he was due to retire in early 1984. With the appointment of Lt. Gen. Rawat, two senior-most officers have been superseded, which is unprecedented in the military.
Lt. Gen. Rawat is currently the Vice-Chief of the Army. He was commissioned in the Fifth Battalion of the Eleven Gorkha Rifles in December 1978.

You may soon not have to worry about carrying physical identity documents at metro airports as a plan for biometric authentication of flyers is all set to take of.
After the successful pilot run for Aadhaar-based air-port entry authentication for passengers at the Hyderabad airport, the Mumbai and Bengaluru airports are planning to take up similar pilot projects.
The Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Hyderabad started a pilot project last year allowing passengers to enter their Aadhaar number at kiosks set up at one of the entry gates. The authorities now plan to implement the exercise at all entry gates.
However, the move will not be mandatory and passengers without Aadhaar numbers can proceed after showing physical identity documents at the airport entry gate.
The biometric-based entry in check-in procedure will substantially reduce the boarding time for passengers at airports and can be followed elsewhere too.
It also said that around 83 per cent of airports plan major passenger self-ser-vice initiatives in the next three years.

The next PSLV-C37, that will put into orbit a record number of 83 satellites, is being scheduled for launch on January 27, said PSLV Project Director B. Jayakumar.
The 100th nozzle would be used in the historic PSLV that would launch 83 satellites.
RAP would have to increase its production to meet the rising demand of the ISRO.
The 100th nozzle would be one among the six nozzles that would be used in the PSLV-C37

Tajikistan and India signed an agreement against terror financing and money laundering.
Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon, who is on a five-day visit to India, said his government would continue to work to stabilise Afghanistan.
In his address to the media, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said both countries would deepen their engagement to deal with the threat of terrorism in the neighbourhood.
“We support India’s candidature for Shang-hai Cooperation Organisation and India's bid for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council.”
Financial Intelligence Unit of India and the Central Asian country signed an agreement to pre-vent financing of terrorism and money laundering. Both sides also signed agreements on bilateral investment and avoidance of double taxation.
Tajikistan invited India to invest in four free economic zones that have come up in the country and thanked it for the modernisation of the Varzob-1 Hydropower Station.
Mr. Rahmon, appreciated the signing of the trilateral Chahbahar port agreement between India, Iran and Afghanistan as the project will provide connectivity to Tajikistan.

A new deal has been reached to complete the evacuation of rebel-held areas of Syria's east Aleppo which ground to a halt over demands from pro-government forces that people also be moved out of two villages besieged by rebels.
A Syrian government official also said the stalled evacuation of Aleppo would resume, alongside some evacuations from the four besieged towns and villages.
The Shia villages of al-Foua and Kefraya in Idlib province are besieged by insurgents. The towns of Madaya and Zabadani are blockaded by pro-government forces.
The operation to evacuate fighters and civilians from the last opposition-held area of Aleppo was suspended for second day, after pro-government militias demanded that wounded people also be brought out of al-Foua and Kefraya, and protesters blocked the road out of Aleppo.
Rebel sources accused pro-government forces they identified as Shia militias of detaining and opening fire on a convoy carrying evacuees from east Aleppo.
The chaos surrounding the Aleppo evacuation reflects the complexity of Syria’s civil war, with an array of groups and foreign interests involved on each side.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said no buses or ambulances had yet entered al-Foua or Kefraya, but the operation was expected to begin soon.

FM said the govt had taken a “somewhat courageous step” by with-drawing high value bank-notes and going in for a large scale currency swap, adding that the remonetisation of the economy with fresh currency notes was not going to take “a very long time.
The fact that India today has the capacity to take and enforce these decisions, and experiment boldly even at a time when the world is look-ing inwards, marks an exception as far as India is concerned,” Mr. Jaitley said.
Once the remonetisation process was complete, which the minister said had made substantial headway, it would mark the creation of a new normal for India.
It had become a way of life, not merely that you had a lot more cash currency as part of your GDP, but the adverse socio-economic consequences of that including aberrations such as not getting into banking system, escaping the tax net and using cash for collateral purposes including crimes.
There were more than 75 crore debit and credit cards, different types of e-wallets being experimented and in-creases in the range of 100 per cent to 1000 per cent in the use of each digital mode of payments, the minister pointed out.
Mr. Jaitley said, common taxation had to lead to a federal bureaucracy and the new indirect tax regime ought to begin in a new financial year, so April 1, 2017, was still a target.

The Vijender Singh juggernaut rolled on as the Indian boxing star took less than 10 minutes to successfully defend his WBO Asia-Pacific su-per middleweight title with an emphatic Technical Knockout (TKO) win over Tanzania's Francis Cheka.
Vijender landed the winning blow in the third round of what was to be a 10-round contest to leave the former World champion Cheka dazed and a packed Thyagraj Stadium delirious.
When the bout finally started, Cheka having a go at the hard-hitting Haryana boxer who landed clean blows.
Cheka was also unsettled by the ‘reach' Vijender enjoyed. While Cheka struggled ow-ing to his shorter reach, Vijender put his long arms to good use.