Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 23 June 2015

Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 23 June 2015

::International::

Eurozone finance chiefs look for Greek deal later this week

  • Eurozone Finance Ministers broke off talks on Monday without an agreement on Greece’s bailout, saying they aim to reach a deal later this week that might keep the country from defaulting and falling out of the currency union.

  • The lack of a result leaves a summit of government leaders later in the day with few prospects of making any concrete decisions on the country’s crisis.

  • Greece needs more loans from its creditors, which include its fellow eurozone states and the International Monetary Fund, in time for June 30, when it faces a debt repayment it cannot afford. The country has been negotiating for four months what economic reforms it should make to get the money.

  • Earlier on Monday, the Greek government submitted proposals to its creditors aimed at breaking the deadlock over the crisis.

  • Buying Greece critical time on Monday, the European Central Bank for a third time in less than a week increased its emergency funding to Greek lenders to stanch heavy deposit withdrawals, according to a Greek banking official with knowledge of the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

::Business::

Think tank report hints at diversion of cheap farm loans

  • Pointing to a possible diversion of subsidised funds meant for farmers to non-agricultural uses, a research paper by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) has found that the crop loans extended in India are in fact close to exceeding the total expenditure on farm sector inputs.

  • In 2012-13, the aggregate short-term credit — provided primarily to finance the purchase of inputs — was as much as 99.97 per cent of the input cost, including compensation for hired labour.

  • During the 1970s, 1980s and even till the 1990s, the aggregate short-term credit as a proportion of input costs in agriculture was in the range of 13-20 per cent.

Only a few thousand pre-2005 notes left in circulation: RBI (Register and Login to read Full News..)

::India & world::

Indian nurses in U.K. may face expulsion

  • Changes to British immigration rules will force thousands of non-European Union foreign nurses recruited by the National Health Service (NHS) to leave the country in the next two years, threatening to throw the healthcare system into disarray and imposing high financial costs on the NHS.

  • Of those who will be forced to leave, a significant number are likely to be from India.

  • The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has released new research findings at its annual conference now under way at Bournemouth.

Minimum earning

  • Under the new rules that will take effect in 2017, non-European foreign workers must earn a minimum of £35,000 a year to be allowed to stay in the country after six years. Most nurses would not meet the criterion.

::Miscellaneous::

Critics of World Bank projects intimidated: report

  • Indian government and company officials engaged in widespread use of intimidation, including threats of physical violence and death, against outspoken members of communities that stand to be displaced or otherwise affected by World Bank-financed projects, according to a scathing report this week from a major human rights group.

  • The 144-page Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, “At Your Own Risk: Reprisals against Critics of World Bank Group Projects,” detailed how governments and powerful companies in India and across the world have “threatened, intimidated, and misused criminal laws” against such persons even as the Bank and its private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), “failed to take adequate steps to help create a safe environment in which people can express concern or criticism about projects.”

Lalit Modi row could stall GST roll out (Register and Login to read Full News..)

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Sources: Various News Papers & PIB

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