Current Affairs Quiz - February, 2020

Notes:
India’s leading woman Tennis player Ankita Raina won the women’s singles title in the $25,000 ITF Thailand Championship. This is her first ITF singles title of the season and 10th of her sport career.
The 27-year-old third-seeded Ankita Raina beat Chloe Paquet of France 6-3, 7-5 in the summit clash, to clinch the title. Ankita had also won the doubles title of the tournament, along with Bibiane Schoofs of the Netherlands. Earlier this year, she had also reached the semi-finals at another $25000 event in Canberra.

Notes:
The MLA of Sivasagar constituency in the state of Assam, Pranab Kumar Gogoi recently passed away. He had also served as the Speaker of the Assam state assembly.
The noted legislator was born in 1936 and was an advocate by profession. He was a veteran member of the Congress Party and was first elected to the state assembly in 2001. He was known for introducing the definition of the term “Assamese”, during the previous term of Congress government in the state.

Notes:
The biennial Defence exhibition of India, ‘DefExpo’ was recently inaugurated at Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister also attended the inaugural programme.
A live demonstration of naval systems, aerial systems and land systems was performed during the ceremony. The main theme of the DefExpo 2020 is ‘India: The Emerging Defence Manufacturing Hub’ and the focus will be on ‘Digital Transformation of Defence’. The five-day-exhibition is to be attended by delegates and military manufacturers from more than 70 countries. The fifth India-Russia Military Industry Conference is also to be held on the side-lines of the event.

Notes:
The four-day National Horticultural Fair, which is the country’s biggest horticultural fair is set to be organised at the Hessarghatta campus of the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR), Bengaluru.
Indian Institute of Horticultural Research organises the national-level fair, which is scheduled to be held from February 5 to 8, 2020. The theme of this year’s fair is ‘Making farming an enterprise’. More than 50,000 farmers from various States of the country are expected to take part in the exhibition. Several crop varieties, horticultural technologies and practices are to be showcased in the fair.

Notes:
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently announced that it has discovered a new natural gas field with 80 trillion standard cubic feet of shallow gas resources. The new gas field was named ‘Jebel Ali gas field’.
The field is located between the territories of Dubai and Abu Dhabi and reported to span around 5,000 square kilometres. This discovery would help the country become more energy independent, and self-sufficient. As of now, the UAE imports natural gas from its neighbouring country Qatar for electricity. The National Oil companies of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are set to further explore the field.

Notes:
The Union Cabinet recently approved the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2020, to confer the status of Institution of National Importance (INI) to five Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs).
The Five IIITs in Public-Private-Partnership mode at Surat, Bhopal, Bhagalpur, Agartala and Raichur are to conferred with the INI status. After the status has been granted, the institutions would be able to award degrees and to use the nomenclature of Bachelor of Technology (BTech) or Master of Technology (MTech) or PhD degree. The existing 15 IIITs had already been provided with the INI status.

Notes:
The Union Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs has recently launched two Assessment Frameworks, namely Ease of Living Index (EoLI) and Municipal Performance Index (MPI) 2019.
The two indices are expected to assess the quality of life of citizens in 100 Smart Cities and 14 other cities, with more than 1 million population. The MPI assesses the performance of municipalities based on five parameters of Service, Finance, Planning, Technology and Governance.

Notes:
The state of Maharashtra recently announced that ‘Bharosa Centre’ would be launched in the state to monitor the impact of social media on youth.
The proposed Centre would comprise a psychologist, woman police officer and counsellor in the Raigad district of the state to monitor the impact of social media on youth. The announcement was made during the closing ceremony of the seventh Aurangabad International Film Festival.

Notes:
In 2019, the United Nations General Assembly announced 10 February as the World Pulses Day. This was followed by the celebration of the year 2016 as the International Year of Pulses (IYP), across the world, led by the Food and Agriculture Organization.
The day is celebrated to raise awareness about the nutritional values of pulses and ways to tackle malnutrition through pulses.

Notes:
The national online platform for public procurement, Government e-Marketplace (GeM) was launched by the Union Commerce Ministry in 2016. It is an open and transparent procurement platform for government departments.
GeM was recently in news as public procurement worth Rs.40,000 crore has taken place through the online portal. In the recent Union budget, it was announced that government is looking to increase the turnover of the GeM portal to Rs.3 lakh crore.