(FREE) UPSC Current Affairs 2024 PDF

Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 12 May 2021

::NATIONAL::

NITI Aayog and Mastercard have jointly released a report highlighting key elements of a roadmap India can follow to achieve the next level of digital transformation in the next three years.
This report titled ‘Connected Commerce: Creating a Roadmap for a Digitally Inclusive Bharat’ identifies challenges in accelerating digital financial inclusion in India and provides recommendations for making digital services accessible to its 1.3 billion citizens.

Key recommendations by the report:

To strengthening the payment infrastructure to promote a level playing field for NBFCs and banks.
To enabling agricultural NBFCs to access low-cost capital and deploy a ‘phygital’ (physical + digital) model for outcomes.
To leveraging existing smartphones and contactless cards, and aim for an inclusive, interoperable, and fully London ‘Tube’.

Puducherry has achieved the target of 100% piped water connection in rural areas under the Jal Jeevan Mission.
With this, the UT became the fourth State/UT after Goa, Telangana and Andaman and Nicobar Islands to provide assured tap water supply to every rural home.
Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) envisages supply of 55 litres of water per person per day to every rural household through Functional Household Tap Connections (FHTC) by 2024.

Conservationists in Chile are reintroducing the rhea to its native Patagonia region, after the flightless bird was brought to near-extinction by illegal hunting.

About Rheas:

Rheas Are the largest flightless bird of South America.
These play a fundamental role in creating and maintaining healthy grasslands by dispersing seeds to renew vegetative growth.
Rheas are listed as near-threatened on the IUCN’s Red List ofThreatened Species.

Recent study showed that ending the lottery-based system of allocating H-1B visas in favour of awage-based system will make it harder for international students to get a work permit in the US.

About HI-B visa:

H1-B Visa is a multiple entry non-immigrant visa which allows foreign workers employed by US companies to work in the United States.
H1B visa holders can work in the United States fora maximum period of 6 years.

With an aim to boost listing of start-ups, markets regulator Sebi has notified a slew of relaxations to norms, including reducing holding period for pre-issue capital and allowing discretionary allotment to eligible investors.

About:

The changes have been made to the framework for listing on the Innovators Growth Platform (IGP).
This comes after the board of Sebi approved a proposal in March in this regard.
Other relaxations include easing delisting requirements and relaxation in guidelines for migrating to main board.
This is aimed at making the platform more accessible to companies in view of the evolving start-up ecosystem.
The regulator has reduced the period of holding of 25 per cent of pre-issue capital of the issuer company by eligible investors to one year from the current requirement of two years.

On May 11, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will depart asteroid Bennu, and start its two-year long journey back to Earth.
OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first mission to visit a near-Earth asteroid, survey its surface and collect a sample from it.

About Asteroid Bennu:

Bennu is an asteroid about as tall as the Empire State Building, located about 200 million miles away from the Earth.
Bennu is named after an Egyptian deity. The name was suggested by a nine-year-old boy from North Carolina in 2013, who won NASA’s “Name that Asteroid” competition.
The asteroid was discovered by a team from the NASA-funded Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research team in 1999.
Bennu is a B-type asteroid, implying that it contains significant amounts of carbon and various other minerals.
Bennu is considered to be an ancient asteroid that has not gone through a lot of composition-altering change through billions of years, which means that below its surface lie chemicals and rocks from the birth of the solar system.
Therefore, scientists and researchers are interested in studying this asteroid as it might give them clues about the origins of the solar system, the sun, the Earth and the other planets.