Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 22 December 2016

:: National ::

In simultaneous searches, unprecedented in their scale and nature, the IT dept went through the premises of Tamil Nadu in Chennai, Bengaluru and AP and seized Rs. 30 lakh cash in new currency and five kg of gold.
Besides, they unearthed “undisclosed in-come” to the tune of Rs. 5 crore from the house of Mr. Rao's son Vivek Papisetty in Thiruvanmiyur.
Considering that the State police were under the Chief Secretary's command, the IT officers in the afternoon requisitioned deployment of armed personnel from the Central Re-serve Police Force to provide security.
Nearly 100 senior officials of the IT Dept were involved in theoperations which continued late into the night. The State Government did not react to the development.
On December 8, the IT Department cracked a case of money laundering after scrutinising the premises of Mr. Reddy, sand miner K. Sreenivasulu and their close associate Prem Kumar.

The Centre approved the promulgation of an ordinance to enable industries to pay wages by cheque or by direct credit into bank accounts of workers earning up to Rs. 18,000 a month, without taking their explicit consent as required under the law.
Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment Bandaru Dattatreya said wage payment through the banking system would only be optional, until the State governments or the Centre came up with a notification for specific industries.
The move is significant inview of the Centre promoting cashless transactions after its decision to scrap the old Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 currency notes.
The present law states that all payment of wages should be in cash, with a provision asking employers to obtain writ-ten permission of the worker to pay either by cheque, or by crediting the wages to his or her bank account.
The ordinance, which will need the President's assent to become law, pro-poses changes to Section 6 of the Payment of Wages Act of 1936.

Beginning a new level of bilateral military engagement, Nepal will hold its first ever joint military exercise with China on February 10.
The focus of the military exercise, named Pratikar-1, will be on training Nepali forces in dealing with hostage scenarios involving international terror groups.
Nepal has conducted exercises with India earlier. Analysts say that though the military drill with China does not violate the 1950 India-Nepal treaty of peace and friendship, it does appear unconventional.
Reports suggested that the exercise will firm up Kath-mandu's preparedness to deal with hostage situations like the one that caused large number of deaths in Dhaka's Holey Artisan bakery in July.

Overstaying Indian nationals violating visa norms prompted Hong Kong, a China-administered territory, to alter its visa agreement with India.
Hong Kong, which used to be part of a block of countries that gave Indians unconditional visa-free entry, has introduced “pre-registration” for Indian nationals to prevent illegal immigration.
Under the previous visa agreement, Indian visitors could visit the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region for 14 days. However, the region had complained about abuse of the agreement by illegal immigrants from India.
Indian nationals must apply for, and success-fully complete, pre-arrival registration online before they can visit or transit the HKSAR visa-free.
It clarified that such registration would not be necessary for those transiting through the Hong Kong airport without leaving the airport transit area. The arrangement will be introduced on January 23.
Hong Kong's unilateral decision came a year after its government sent a delegation headed by the AssistantDirector of Immigration from the Immigration Department and the Hong Kong Police in December 2015.

In order to further incentivise electronic trans-actions, the government on Wednesday announced that it has directed all public sec-tor banks to lower the fees they charge for various forms of digital transactions up to March 31, 2017.
For Unstructured Supplementary Service Data(USSD) transactions above Rs. 1,000, a further discount of fifty paise on these rates shall apply. NEFT transfers of up to Rs 10,000 attract a fee of Rs 2.5 per transaction.
Transactions between Rs. 10,000 and less than Rs. 1 lakh attract a fee of Rs. 5, those between Rs. 1 lakh and Rs. 2 lakh attract a fee of Rs. 15, and the fee for transactions above Rs. 2 lakh is Rs. 25. Ser-vice tax is charged on top of this.
This follows the RBI's notification in which it instructed banks to remove all charges on customers for transactions up to Rs.1,000 settled on IMPS, USSD or UPI systems between January 1, 2017 and March 31, 2017.