Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 16 September 2014

National

The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved appointments to several key posts .
Nirmaljeet Singh Kalsi, a 1984-batch IAS officer of the Punjab cadre, has been appointed Adviser, Inter-State Council Secretariat, under the Union Home Ministry, by temporarily downgrading the post that fell vacant after the retirement of P.G. Dhar Chakraborty.
Alok Shrivastava from the Madhya Pradesh cadre has been appointed Joint Secretary, Union Shipping Ministry, by temporarily downgrading the newly created post of Additional Secretary in the Ministry.
Anand Kumar has been made Managing Director, National Highways Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd., by temporarily placing the newly created post at this level.
Vijay Laxmi Joshi has been appointed Secretary, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation;
Tapan Ray, Additional Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology; Aruna
Sundararajan, Administrator, Universal Service Obligation Fund;
Neeraj Kumar Gupta, Secretary, Board for Reconstruction of Public Sector Enterprises; and
Amarjeet Sinha, Additional Secretary, Department of Higher Education.
Yudhvir Singh Malik has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, Food Safety and Standards Authority of India.

Global hunger figures down by more than 200 million
The number of people in the world without enough to eat fell to 805 million in 2012-14, down from over a billion in 1990-92, three United Nations agencies dealing with nutrition issues said in a joint report .
The figures “confirmed a positive trend, which has seen the number of hungry people decline globally by more than 100 million over the last decade and by more than 200 million since 1990-92,” the 2014 edition of The State of Food Insecurity in the World said.
In 2000, the international community adopted the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a commitment to halve the proportion of hungry people in the world in the period from 1990 to 2015.