Current Affairs Quiz - April, 2020

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor has recently announced that the reverse repo rate has been cut by 25 basis points to 3.75%.
This announcement has been made by the RBI in its efforts towards increasing liquidity amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. As the repo rate has been kept unchanged at 4.4%, the spread between the repo and reverse repo has been widened. This encourages the banks to lend the money instead of parking it with the RBI.

Notes:
The Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar has recently launched a mobile application named ‘Kisan Rath’, for better transportation of perishable agricultural goods during lockdown.
Developed by the National Informatics, the mobile application assists the farmers to find transport facility. The app is expected to include as many as 5 lakh trucks and 20,000 tractors in the chain, to transport the agricultural goods to markets. Recently, a nation-wide call centre has also been launched for the same purpose.

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India has recently granted a special refinance package of Rs.50000 Cr to All India financial institutions (AIFI) such as the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and National Housing Bank (NHB).
Due to the financial crisis witnessed by the AIFIs, they could not mobilise resources from the market. Rs 25,000 crore is granted to NABARD for refinancing regional rural banks, cooperative banks and micro finance institutions. Rs 15,000 crore is given to SIDBI for on-lending and Rs 10,000 crore is given to NHB for supporting housing finance companies.

Notes:
The Matterhorn mountain is a famous mountain located in the Alps range with a height of 4478 meters. It is one of the highest summits of the Alps and spans between two European countries Switzerland and Italy.
The summit was seen in news recently, as a famous Swiss light artist Gerry Hofstetter lit up the mountain with the Indian flag to express their solidarity for India, in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. The summit has been illuminated with the flags of various countries for nearly 3 weeks, as a part of nightly series.

Notes:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has recently announced that the two NASA astronauts will be sent to the space station on May 27,
The mission is set to be carried out aboard the Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX, the US-based private space company owned by Elon Musk. After ending its 30-year space shuttle program in 2011, NASA has been relying on the Russian space agency Rocosmos for launching its astronauts to space station.

Notes:
The 44th session of the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO was initially scheduled to be held from June 29 to July 9, in the Chinese city of Fuzhou, the capital of the country’s Fujian province.
As per the recent announcement of the Education Ministry of China, the 44th session has been postponed to a later date. This unanimous decision has been made in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. The date of the postponed session has not yet been announced.

Notes:
The Government of India has recently launched a nationwide database of healthcare professionals and volunteers named ‘Covid warriors’.
The database is aimed at efficiently managing the available human resources to tackle the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic. The state and district wise availability of human resources along with the contact details of the nodal officers are made available in the database, which can be accessed by all states and Union territories.

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India recently notified that it has decided to revise Ways and Means Advances (WMA) for the period of April 2020 to September 2020, to Rs 2 lakh crore. The limit has been extended from the previous limit of Rs. 1.2 lakh crore.
Ways and Means advances, WMA is a mechanism by which state governments receive short-term funding from the Reserve Bank of India, which is to be repaid in 3 months. The funds are used for balancing temporary mismatches and are usually granted at the repo rate.

Notes:
Fitch solutions of the American credit ratings agency Fitch ratings has recently slashed the GDP growth forecast of India for the financial year 2020-21 to 1.8 per cent.
India’s growth rate was previously forecasted at 4.6 per cent, as per the Fitch solutions. The reduction in the rate is mainly due to contraction in the private consumption, loss of income and slow delivery of fiscal stimulus by the government.

Notes:
The Pune Municipal Corporation has developed a mobile application called ‘Saiyam’ under Smart Cities Mission (SCM), which aims at tracking home-quarantined people.
The application has been developed to ensure the people follow strict quarantine measures by following their locations through GPS technology. All home quarantined citizens are mandated to install the application and based on their movements, the users are classified into three colours namely Red, Yellow and Green.