Current Affairs - August 13, 2018 Current Affairs

Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad released 'Digital North East Vision 2022' in Guwahati. Digital technologies to transform the lives of people of the northeast and enhance the ease of living. A cloud hub for North East will be created in Guwahati and capacity building for 50,000 government staff will be taken up. The number of seats planned for BPOs in the Northeastern states will be doubled to 10,000. The network of common service centres will be expanded to cover all villages.

Haryana Government to launch Ayushman Bharat scheme on Aug 15. The main aim of the scheme to provide cashless healthcare facilities to beneficiaries at empanelled hospitals.The scheme would be initially implemented on a pilot basis in one government hospital in each of the 22 districts, one ESI hospital and one medical college.Under the scheme, families identified by the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) would be provided with coverage of Rs 5 lakh.

All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has started a wellness clinic for its medical students and doctors. Medical college in India experiences the highest level of stress than students in any other country. The wellness clinic is being run under the supervision of the AIIMS psychiatric department.

India's first all-woman Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team for anti-terrorist operations has been inducted in Delhi Police. The 36 elite women commandos, hailing from north-eastern states, have undergone rigorous training of around 15 months from specialists all across India and abroad to handle urban situations as well as jungle operations. Their expertise includes unarmed combat, ambush and counter-ambush and urban operations like building interventions, vehicle intervention and VVIP security. They will be deployed at Red Fort and India Gate during the 2018 Independence Day celebrations. The SWAT team is the brainchild of Amulya Patnaik, the Delhi Police Commissioner.

The Indian Space Research Organisation will have a year-long Vikram Sarabhai centenary celebration starting in August 2019 to honour visionary scientist and its legendary founding father. Sarabhai, the architect of the Indian space programme, the first ISRO chief and renowned cosmic ray scientist, was born on August 12, 1919.

Justice Vijaya Kamlesh Tahilramani was sworn in as the Chief Justice of the Madras High Court. The swearing was administered by Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit at a ceremony at Raj Bhavan, Chennai. Justice Tahilramani served in the Bombay High Court. The appointment is after the elevation of Justice Indira Banerjee, as a Supreme Court judge. Ms.Tahilramani, who was born in 1958, enrolled the Bar Council of Maharashtra and Goa in 1982 and was serving as a government leader and has been practising in Bombay HC. In 2001, she was elevated as a judge of the Bombay High Court.

Former Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee passed away. He was 89 years old. Chatterjee was the Speaker of the Lower House from 2004-09 when Manmohan Singh-led UPA- 1 (United Progressive Alliance) was in power.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Macau in China would overtake oil-rich Qatar with the highest per-capita gross domestic product of any country or jurisdiction on earth, by 2020. Macau is the only place in China where casinos are legal and its gross domestic product has more than tripled from about $34,500 per capita in 2001, the IMF data shows. Three European countries -- Luxembourg, Ireland, and Norway -- made the top 10 places expected to be the world's wealthiest by 2020, while the US came in at No. 12.

Annie Zaidi, an Indian author, has won the 2018 Hindu Playwright Award 2018 for her play 'Untitled' at the 14th edition of The Hindu Theatre Fest at the Taj Coromandel. The award was presented by Ratna Pathak Shah, actor and director. The award, instituted in 2008, carries a prize of Rs 2 lakh for the best original, unpublished and unperformed play script in English.

Smt. Justice Manjula Chellur took Oath as Chairperson, Appellate Tribunal for Electricity, Ministry of Power. Prior to this, Smt. Justice Manjula Chellur was Chief Justice of Bombay High Court. She was the first woman Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court.

Exim Bank of India has signed a multilateral cooperation agreement with member development banks of BRICS to undertake "collaborative research" in distributed ledger/blockchain technology. The MoU signed by Exim Bank Managing Director David Rasquinha was an outcome of the discussions the member development banks had during their annual meeting, with the objective of strengthening the cooperation under the BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism.

The Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting will offer 3-year Santoor women's scholarship for higher education to girls from economically weaker families in the three southern states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Approx 900 girls from the 3 states will be given Santoor scholarship, with Rs 24,000 for each of them per annum to do under-graduation.. The students can apply for the scholarship on "www.santoorscholarships.com" till September 15 or in state-run colleges across the three states. The scholarship is an attempt to empower women to change their life and the world. Enrollment ratio of women pursuing higher education in the country is low and many give up higher study due to lack of financial support.

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie was adjudged the most influential woman in history, through a poll conducted by BBC History Magazine. Marie Curie has topped the 'Women who Changed the World' list followed byRosa Parks (US civil rights activist), Emmeline Pankhurst (leader of the British suffragette movement), Emmeline Pankhurst (leader of the British suffragette movement).

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) launched an initiative "RUCO (Repurpose Used Cooking Oil)" that will enable collection and conversion of used cooking oil to biodiesel. Under this initiative, 64 companies at 101 locations have been identified to enable collection of used cooking oil. According to FSSAI regulations, the maximum permissible limits for Total Polar Compounds (TPC) have been set at 25%, beyond which the cooking oil is unsafe for consumption. Beside this, FSSAI is also working in partnership with Biodiesel Association of India and the food industry to ensure effective compliance of used cooking oil regulations.

Santhali (Santali), a tribal language primarily spoken in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, received global recognition when it got a Wikipedia edition in its own script. The language is been spoken by over 6.4 million people in the states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Assam. The initiative to get a Santhali edition for Wikipedia, began six years ago, in 2012. Santhali, written in the Ol Chiki script currently has content of about 70,000 words.