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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 27 March 2021

::NATIONAL::

According to the Central Information Commission’s annual report, the Centre has only rejected 4.3% of all Right to Information (RTI) requests in 2019-20, the lowest ever rate.

However, almost 40% of these rejections did not include any valid reason, as they did not invoke one of the permissible exemption clauses in the RTI Act, according to an analysis of report data.
This includes 90% of rejections by the Prime Minister’s Office.
Public authorities under the Central government received 13.7 lakh RTI requests in 2019-20, out of which 58,634 were rejected for various reasons.
Rejection rates have fallen since the 13.9% rate in 2005-06, and have been steadily trending downwards since the 8.4% spike in 2014-15.
In 2019-20, they hit their lowest level so far.

Legendary singer Asha Bhosle will be presented the Maharashtra Bhushan award for the year 2020.
A committee headed by Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

With $200 billion of India’s trade flows with Europe, North America and South America at risk due to the blockage of the Suez Canal, the Department of Commerce has worked out an action plan to cope with the crisis, including possibly re-routing shipments through the Cape of Good Hope.

The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa.
A common misconception is that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern tip of Africa. This misconception was based on the misbelief that the Cape was the dividing point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Contemporary geographic knowledge instead states the southernmost point of Africa is Cape Agulhas about 150 kilometres to the east-southeast.
The currents of the two oceans meet at the point where the warm-water Agulhas current meets the cold-water Benguela current and turns back on itself. That oceanic meeting point fluctuates between Cape Agulhas and Cape Point east of the Cape of Good Hope).
The Cape of Good Hope is at the southern tip of the Cape Peninsula approximately 50 km south of Cape Town, South Africa.
When following the western side of the African coastline from the equator, however, the Cape of Good Hope marks the point where a ship begins to travel more eastward than southward.

Eritrea will pull its troops out of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize said, it is a potential breakthrough in a drawn-out conflict that has seen atrocities carried out against civilians.

About:

The Tigray Region is the northernmost of the nine regions (kililat) of Ethiopia.
Tigray is the homeland of the Tigrayan, Irob and Kunama peoples.
Tigray is also known as Region 1 according to the federal constitution.
Its capital and largest city is Mekelle.

Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has made it easier for startups to list on IGP.
Introduced in 2019, IGP is aimed providing technology-oriented start-ups or companies with early-stageinvestors a listing opportunity with a much more relaxed framework.
IGP as a platform has the promise to increase capital availability significantly and has the added advantage ofenabling exits for early-stage investors.

Bacterial strains belonging to the family Methylobacteriaceaewere isolated from different locations aboardthe ISS.
New bacteria contains genes that fix nitrogen, dissolve phosphate and assimilate potassium — threenutrients important for plants to grow both on earth and space.
New bacterial species has been found to bust stress that plants undergo in zero gravity in space.