Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 23 June 2016

:: National ::

India’s efforts for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group will come to a head, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on the sidelines of the SCO summit.
Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar rushed to Seoul for a last-mile push at the NSG plenary, as India received more support for its case from France.
In public statements neither India nor China, that has opposed India’s bid on the ground that it is a non-signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, indicated that they are any closer to a breakthrough in the next two days.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said for the third consecutive day that the issue of non-NPT state membership was not on the agenda at Seoul.
Even so, China admitted for the first time that unofficial discussions on the applications from India and Pakistan had been taking place.

Expanding its horizons, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched 20 satellites through a single rocket, surpassing its 2008 record of launching 10 satellites in a single mission.
Besides the primary Cartosat-2 Series satellite, the PSLV C-34 rocket launched two satellites from Indian universities and 17 foreign satellites, including one for a Google company.
ISRO chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar announced the success of the launch.
Satish Dhawan Space Centre Director termed the launch of the 20 satellites, weighing about 1,288 kg in total, a “major milestone” for the national space agency.
ISRO also ignited the fourth stage of the PSLV rocket twice after the separation of satellites in an experiment, scientists said.
Sathyabamasat, the satellite of Sathyabama University in Chennai, the Swayam satellite of the College of Engineering in Pune, LAPAN-A3 (Indonesia), BIROS (Germany), M3MSat (Canada), SkySat Gen2-1 (USA) of Terra Bela (Google company), GHGSat-D (Canada) and 12 Dove Satellites (USA) were the other satellites that were launched.
The 725.5-kg Cartosat-2 series satellite would be for Earth observation and its imagery would be useful for cartographic applications, urban and rural applications, coastal land use and regulation, and utility management like road networking, ISRO said.
In 2014, Russian Dnepr rocket launched a record 37 satellites in a single mission.

Colombia’s government and the FARC guerrilla group reached agreement on a definitive ceasefire in Latin America’s longest civil war, they said in a joint statement.
The national government and FARC delegations inform the public that we have successfully reached an agreement for a definitive bilateral ceasefire and end to hostilities.
The announcement heralds an end to a half-century conflict that has seen hundreds of thousands of people getting killed.
The deal would all but end the conflict by resolving one of the final points at peace talks between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s biggest rebel group.
The Colombian conflict started as a rural uprising in the 1960s. It has left 260,000 people dead, 45,000 missing and nearly seven million displaced, according to official figures.
Peace talks have been under way in Havana since 2012. They got a boost when the FARC declared a unilateral ceasefire a year ago.

A huge cattle station that pours sediment into the Great Barrier Reef was bought by the government as efforts are stepped up to help the World Heritage site bounce back from mass bleaching.
Global warming has been wreaking havoc on the reef, contributing to an unprecedented bleaching event this year that saw much of it whiten and almost a quarter of corals die.
The reef, which teems with marine life, is also under pressure from farming run-off, with the 560 square kilometre Springvale Station near Cooktown in northern Queensland one of the worst culprits.
Sediment and the attached nutrients have a range of impacts on the reef, so this 56,000 hectare land purchase was critical.
Run-off from the land carries sediment to the reef where it blocks light, smothers marine organisms and reduces coral and seagrass growth.
The government said it planned to remove all cattle from Springvale before rehabilitating the land to reduce erosion.
Scientists have said parts of the 2,300-kilometre long reef will take at least a decade to recover, and the World Wide Fund said good water quality was key to its survival.

The Cabinet approved an extension in the deadline for implementing the Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY) by a year to March 31, 2017.
The UDAY scheme is aimed at bringing ailing power distribution companies (discoms) to a state of operational efficiency, with state governments taking over up to 75 per cent of their respective discoms’ debt and issuing sovereign bonds to pay back the lenders.
The Cabinet decision extends this provision from the earlier deadline of March 31, 2016.
The extension of the timeline is also to give states that have given their in-principle approval a little more time to order their finances before signing the official document, according to experts.
UDAY envisages a permanent resolution of past as well as potential future issues of the sector. It empowers discoms with the opportunity to break even in the next 2-3 years.
The scheme seeks to achieve this through several simultaneous steps including reducing the interest burden on the discoms by allowing the states to take over the bulk of their debt, reducing the cost of power, and increasing the operational efficiencies of the discoms by providing capital and infrastructure like coal linkages.
So far, 19 States have given in-principle approval to join the scheme, out of which 10 states—Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Punjab, Bihar, Haryana, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir—have signed MoUs with the Centre.

The Cabinet approved the setting up of a Rs.10,000 crore fund to support start-ups in becoming full fledged business entities.
The fund is expected to generate employment for 18 lakh persons.
The approval will pave the way for setting up “Fund of Funds for Startups” at the Small Industries Development Bank of India for contributions to various Alternative Investment Funds registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India.
The Rs.10,000 crore-corpus will be built up over the 14th and 15th Finance Commission cycles subject to progress of the scheme and availability of funds. Already Rs.500 crore has been provided.