Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 11 February 2015

:: National ::

The temple town of Mangalagiri is all set to get yet another national institute -- National Institute of Design (NID) – a premier design institute under the Union Ministry of Commerce and Textiles.
The location of NID at Mangalagiri is expected to give a fillip to not only to the local handloom industry, but also help boost the prospects of fashion designing in Guntur and Vijayawada.
The NID offers courses in design -- Graduate Diploma Programme in Design (GDPD), a four-year graduate programme and Post Graduate Programme in Design PGPD, a two-and-a-half-year programme for post graduates. Students are screened through an all India entrance test.
This will be the fourth NID campus in the country with the other three being located at Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Bengaluru.
The NID has departments in 30 institutions across the country, including IIT, Mumbai.

Professor Sen will deliver the Charleston-EFG Keynes Lecture at the Charleston Festival in the U.K.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has won the newly instituted Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize.
“In the spirit of John Maynard Keynes’ work, life and legacy, this new global prize recognises Professor Sen’s outstanding contribution to society,” a release accessed here said.
Regarded as one of the foremost thinkers in the field of famine, poverty, social choice and welfare economics, Professor Sen has done ground-breaking work that has been academically influential and had a profound impact on the formation of development policy worldwide.
Currently a Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, he has been a Professor at the London School of Economics. Till 2004, he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

Facebook announced a tie-up with Reliance Communications to launch Internet.org in India, bringing to the land of a billion-plus people a service that the social media giant says helps affordable Internet access but whose critics disapprove its restrictiveness.
India now becomes the sixth destination for Internet.org, a Facebook-led initiative envisaged about a year-and-a-half back with six other founding partners, including Samsung and Qualcomm.
The service has already been launched in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia and Ghana.
The tie-up gives subscribers of the Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications who have Internet-enabled handsets free access to 38 Websites – a mix of news, music, education, weather and health sites.
The list includes Facebook, Wikipedia, and Reliance Astrology. The lone search option available is Microsoft’s Bing. They can be accessed via an Android app.
For the time being, the service has gone live in Maharashtra, Gujarat, A.P., T.N. and Kerala.
The pan-India launch is planned in three months.

Kerala made a clean sweep of the medals in the 10km elite women’s scratch race on the opening day of the track events in the cycling competitions of the 35th National Games.
After a disappointing show in the road events, the Kerala girls made amends on the track as Mahitha Mohan, V.R. Rajani and S. Bismi made it a 1-2-3 for the host in a highly tactful and dramatic race.
Earlier, Services’ Satbir Singh pipped Tamil Nadu’s C. Rajesh to clinch the gold in the elite men’s 15km scratch race.
Tamil Nadu’s Manisha was in the lead for a while and the lead changed hands a few times.
But, throughout the race the three riders from Kerala did not allow things to drift, staying within striking distance of the lead cyclists.
Midway through the 28th lap, Mahitha and Rejani made their move and hit the front followed by Bismi.
Mahita sprinted ahead of Rejani at the finish to take the gold while Bismi came in third.