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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 03 July 2014

Current Affairs 03 July(IAS)

Development and security will top Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s agenda on his visit to Jammu and Kashmir, which comes just a month after he was sworn-in.
The Prime Minister is making a short one-day visit, but touching both Jammu and the Kashmir Valley, with stops in Jammu, Katra, Srinagar and Uri, inaugurating a railway line, a power project, addressing a gathering in Katra and addressing the troops in Srinagar. However, there will be no political outreach as in the past. There are no official meetings with the Chief Minister, his cabinet, or any public gatherings in the Valley.
The Prime Minister’s agenda isn’t the only departure from the past. He will be stopping in Srinagar for a couple of hours only, to address a ‘Sainik Sammelan’, speaking to a group of soldiers posted at various places in the State. He will also hold a security review meeting with corp commanders.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an avid user of social media, is the third most followed world leader on micro blogging website Twitter, next only to U.S. President Barack Obama and the Pope.
Mr. Modi, who overtook Indonesian President S.B. Yudhoyono on Thursday, has 5.09 million followers. Mr. Obama has 43.9 million followers, while the Pope has over 14 million and Yudhoyono has 5.08 million.
This shows how Mr. Modi has been actively using Twitter to connect with the masses reinforcing the tool of digital diplomacy in a larger context making the social media platform a powerful channel for communicating and engaging with all Indians across the country.

In a bid to clear confusion and duplication between the National Population Register (NPR) and Aadhaar cards, the NDA government has decided to explore the possibility of a synergy between the two ambitious projects of the previous UPA government.
The issue was discussed at a high-level meeting, convened by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and attended by Law and Justice and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Minister of State for Planning Rao Inderjit Singh. The meeting discussed how the two could be made “complementary.
The issue will now be discussed by officials of all Ministries concerned and a way will be found soon.
The Home Ministry has already suggested that the NPR and Aadhaar schemes be merged under the Registrar General of India (RGI) or division of work between the two should be in such a way that enrolment is done entirely by NPR while the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which runs Aadhaar, carries out reduplication ahead of generating the unique number.
The UIDAI was set up by the UPA government in 2009 under the chairmanship of Nandan Nilekani. It comes under the Planning Commission.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the Centre would sort out compensation issues with States to ensure early roll-out of Goods and Service Tax (GST), a new indirect tax regime that will subsume various levies.
After meeting State finance ministers, he said there was a broad consensus on implementing the GST regime, and efforts would be made to sort out the pending issues, especially with regard to compensation for loss of revenue.

Protesting against the imbalance in favour of developed countries at the ongoing World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations at Geneva, India on Wednesday broke away from the consensus on the Trade Facilitation (TF) Protocol. India’s refusal to ratify this agreement that has been readied to their satisfaction as a follow up to the Bali Ministerial decisions of last December has led to a stalemate at the talks.
In a strong statement India said it will support the TF agreement only if there is progress in Geneva on mechanisms for ensuring permanent protection of the government’s Minimum Support Price (MSP) against the WTO’s subsidy caps.
The new government is clear that the MSP is a tool important enough for us to take this stand at the WTO.
India has repeatedly expressed concern over the uneven pace of work at the negotiations in Geneva over the past few months but despite that the imbalance in progress has persisted.